Dante, the great love and the story of Paolo and Francesca. Part 1

Dante, the great love and the story of Paolo and Francesca. Part 1On Christmas Eve I was in Paris (a city I love very much) and, at the Rodin Museum, I was strolling around the beautiful marble The Kiss by Auguste Rodin. I wanted to admire it quite well. I never paid attention before, but the sculpture is nothing but the artistic rendering of the famous episode of Paolo and Francesca in Dante's Inferno V, 73-142: indeed, it's just its climax, when the two young people come to the fateful kiss dragging their love, at first platonic and spiritual, to the dead end of an overwhelming passion, unfortunately destined to end up in hell. I love this masterwork so much, that now a postcard with its reproduction is "parked" on my fridge.

Rodin conceived this plastic work, 181 cm. high, in 1882, precisely in view of his Gates of Hell, but then he accomplished it as a sculpture in its own right (the representation of the two lovers on the jamb of the Gate is different). The marble statue was then commissioned by the French State for the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1889 and stands now in the Rodin Museum: two copies were made respectively for a British collector (now at the Tate Gallery in London) and for the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek of Copenhagen, but there is also a smaller copy (90 cm. high) that Rodin left for the museum named after him in Philadelphia. There are also numerous bronze versions. Copies, in fact, were, like the original (performed by Turcan, who left the sculpture almost incomplete), accomplished by students of Rodin after his clay model (also preserved at the Rodin Museum), since the sculptor, incredibly, was not able to work with marble, except giving the final touches (!).

The death of Paolo and Francesca by Alexandre Cabanel, 1870

                                      (French academic painter of historical subjects)The molded bodies (nudes destinated to evoke primordial emotions) are beautiful, like Michelangelo's (but, according to the author, the statue was too traditional), suitable for a 360-degree view, with Francesca wrapping herself sinuously around the athletic body of Paolo, while the rock where they sit is hardly sculpted, just like in the Prisons by Michelangelo: the left hand of Paul holds the book they were reading together in the episode and which pushed them to love (Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it), while it seems that the kiss of the two young people never comes to be completed (perhaps, have they been stopped?). The couple was very popular in the nineteenth century because they expressed romantic love at its best, a thwarted love, and the combination of "love and death". The sculpture actually aroused scandal when it was exhibited in Chicago (hence it was locked in an inner room): even when the English copy arrived in Sussex, thanks to its buyer, it provoked the concerns of some puritanical ladies of the place, terrified by the possibility that it could inspire too much the soldiers quartered in the area, so it was removed from public view. Moreover, in the representation, Rodin has insisted on the role of Francesca, a lover perfectly equal to Paolo: the sculpture radiates a strong passion, erotic, sensual, yet elegant and measured, since the nude has been worked out very harmoniously.

After all, artists who have portrayed this moment of love are numerous: apart from the prints of Gustave Doré, who represented the entire Divine Comedy, paintings about the couple were performed by William Blake, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1855), Ari Scheffer (1855), Amos Cassioli (1870), Alexandre Cabanel (1870) and so on. The same Auguste Rodin, in view of the great Gates of Hell conceived several times the representation of this extraordinary love story, created sketches, versions in bronze and marble, in preparation (and appendix) of what was later inserted into the Gate and for the same Kiss.So, the story of Paolo and Francesca has captivated thousands of readers, artists and sensitive souls ....