Morceaux d\u27Amphithéâtre: Science and the sculpture of Auguste Rodin

This dissertation undertakes the first examination of French sculptor Auguste Rodin\u27s participation in the lively dialogue between the artistic and scientific communities of fin-de-siècle Paris. It demonstrates that science was an inspiration and a provocation for Rodin (1840-1917)---both a fresh and compelling source of ideas to exploit in his sculpture and a challenge to the primacy of artistic sensibility in interpreting nature. By exploring the impact of scientific discourses and technology on Rodin\u27s oeuvre, this study arrives at radical new readings of his most important works and reveals that many of his innovations arose from a desire to prove that art held a greater claim to truth than science. Rodin used physiognomy and the related study of regional type to motivate sculptures---from intimate studies of hands to major commissions, such as the Burghers of Calais (1895) and the Monument to Balzac (1898)---but also subverted both discourses by forcing multivalent readings of the human form. Taking up the debate over the relative merits of scientific and artistic accuracy brought to the fore by the invention of chronophotography, he delivered the anatomically impossible pose of the Walking Man (1899) as art\u27s bold riposte to the photograph\u27s stilted depiction of movement and the passage of time. For his most important sculpture, Rodin appropriated the striking postures that characterized hysteria, to which he had exceptional exposure through his ties to the family and intellectual circle of Doctor Jean-Martin Charcot of the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière; divorced from its literal affliction and transposed into the seething space of the Gates of Hell (1880-1917), the contorted form of the body stricken with the malady of the age becomes an expression of eternal suffering. By manipulating and subverting scientific discourses and technology, the artist created a new and potent sculptural idiom that we recognize today as idiosyncratic of Rodin---and distinctly modern