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Rodin, 'Fugit Amor', 1886

 


The pulling apart and pushing together of bodies comes to define Rodin's Fugit Amor, and much of his oeuvre from the late nineteenth century. Cast here in bronze, a man and a woman cling onto one another, precariously balanced on a slab of rock, which their undulating bodies seem to grow out from. At once weighted but also weightless, Rodin's small sculpture is infused with Classical references, and becomes a conversion of opposites, symbolising the desperation and ultimate futility of love affairs. 

The title translates to 'futile love', already implying a barrier to togetherness or the wasted energy on the attempt which Rodin depicts here. Glistening in bronze, the two bodies become even more anguished and elongated, in a combination of peaks and troughs: the woman lifts her head and torso upwards, hand raking through her hair, whilst the man slides off the rockface, his legs dangling precariously into the abyss. However, they still seem to deliberately fit together, illustrated by the man's arms which wrap around the woman's torso, pulling her back to him, or his head which fits snugly underneath her left arm. They seem unable to let one another go, despite their doomed circumstance, clinging to one another yet at the same time, moving in opposite directions, clawing at each other but remaining in constant dynamism. The precariousness of the sculpture highlights Rodin's ability to manipulate the tricky medium of bronze, successfully on a small scale, to present two interlocking lovers. 

Originally featured on Rodin's Gates of Hell, inspired by Dante's Inferno, the artist also borrows from his own corpus of human figures for the male form lying to create the horizontal axis of the sculpture - his elongated, stretched out pose is a flipped over version of Rodin's Prodigal Son. As well as this, the sculpture is said to reference the story of Paolo and Francesca's forbidden love affair, which ended in both their deaths and their condemnation to the swirling depths of hell, as recorded by Dante. It was a subject which was particularly popular during this period, for its tragic symbolism, and perhaps the movement and dynamism composed by Rodin through sculpture is a reference to the lovers' eternal damnation. Certainly, Dante writes of the adulterers occupying the second circle of hell as plagued by the 'infernal hurricane that never rests', which once again connects to the whirling, unbalanced composition of Rodin's piece. When exhibited in 1887 at Georges Petit Gallery, it was referred to as an 'arabesque of limbs', reflected in the pulling apart of the two figures, whose bodies are stretched to their limits, yet remain wrapped around one another in an eternal, fatal embrace. 

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