Statues of liberty

When I was a teenager, I had a friend whose father ran one of the local churches.  Sometimes I went to the house where my friend lived and remember being slightly surprised to discover a small white statuette on a corner table in a reception room used for informal meetings with church members.  It was around 25cm high and showed a man and woman, seated, unclothed, embracing each other, and kissing.  It’s location appeared somewhat incongruous: when would an evangelical Protestant minister make use of such an object, when giving advice or instruction to members of his congregation?   To my uneducated taste, it also appeared kitschy: a sentimental, unworldly representation of sexual desire.  To repeat, I was a teenager: I knew little about art or passion. 

There is a full-size version of the same statue, just under 2m high, currently on view at Tate Modern in London outside the entrance to The Making of Rodin exhibition, which runs until mid-November.  “The Kiss” is one of Auguste Rodin’s most famous works, a monumental sculpture which merits close attention and admiration: the adjacency of the couple’s left feet, the muscle definition of the man’s back, the matching ninety-degree angle bends at the woman’s left elbow and knee, and the book in the man’s right hand.  What was he reading, I wonder, before she sat next to him and kissed him?  I now know better than to consider the work to be kitsch, but I remain puzzled about why a small copy was on display in a Guildford vicarage. 

One of Rodin’s career-long preoccupations was the construction of a huge composite sculpture called The Gates of Hell, which drew on characters and incidents from Dante’s Inferno to create a visual representation of the multiplicity of forms of the human experience of sin and punishment.  For example, the sculpture now known as “The Thinker”, thought by many to be a representation of Dante himself, was to be placed near the top of the arch, looking down upon the tragedy of human life and suffering.  Another of the elements to be included in an early plan of the work was “The Kiss”, based upon the story of Francesca da Polenta, a Florentine noblewoman and near contemporary of Dante, who was married to Giovanni Malatesta from Rimini.  The marriage – as would have been usual at the time – was arranged for political and financial reasons rather than love.  Once she was married and had moved to Rimini, Francesca met and fell in love with a man named Paolo, with whom she conducted a clandestine affair for several years.  However, Giovanni discovered what was going on and he killed the two lovers – one his wife, the other his younger brother – with his own hands.

According to tradition, which Dante recounts in Canto V of Inferno, the two lovers started their affair after reading the story of Guinevere and Lancelot, the wife and best friend of King Arthur, the legendary king of England, whose life and deeds were chronicled by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia regum Britanniae, written nearly two hundred years prior to the Divine Comedy.   Coincidentally, the story of King Arthur was also the subject of Thomas Malory’s poem, Le Morte d’Arthur, one of the first books that William Caxton printed in England in 1485, and this text became the pretext for Roland Barthes’s famous essay “La mort de l’auter” (“The death of the author”), published in 1967, which argues for the abandonment of focus on the intentions of the author, giving primacy instead to the interpretations of the reader: “the death of the author” says Barthes, “is the birth of the reader.”  Stripped of its polemic tone, the core idea is that the reception of a text among the reading public is at least as important in our understanding of the work as anything that the writer might have believed about the work’s meaning.  Translating that thought from literature to sculpture suggests that, regardless of what Rodin thought he was doing when he represented Dante’s account of the passion of Francesca and Paolo, my teenage friend’s father might have drawn a very different lesson for the members of his congregation, when he directed their attention to the statuette in his reception room.

The stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table that are found in early English manuscripts are generally accepted by contemporary historians to be more fable than fact.  That part of the story concerning Lancelot’s affair with Guinevere was added later, by the French writer Chrétien de Troyes, and in the following century his account of this tragic Cornish love triangle became the model for Dante’s account of the murder of Francesca and Paolo in Rimini, which in turn inspired Rodin’s sculpture in Paris.  Meanwhile, Malory’s poetic retelling of the story provided Barthes – also in Paris – with the title of his famous essay, in which the standing of the writer of stories is demoted from author to scriptor, emphasising the active role of the reader in the determination of the meaning of the text. 

What meaning, then, might this artwork have for us today?  Does it matter whether or not we know that Rodin intended the sculpture to become part of The Gates of Hell, or that that book in Paolo’s left hand was written by de Troyes?   Do we anticipate the pleasure of the kiss, as the lover’s lips meet, with greater poignancy if we know the fate that will soon befall them when their affair is discovered by her husband, who is his brother?  Or should we simply enjoy the work for its verisimilitude, and the elegance and sensitivity with which it captures a moment of universal human pleasure, neither knowing nor caring about the story that lies behind the characters?  What difference does it make if the kissing couple are stripped of their history as well as their clothes?

The exhibition at Tate Modern also includes one of my favourite Rodin pieces, “The Burghers of Calais”, which shows six gaunt men, dressed in rags, and with ropes around their necks, walking slowly towards an unhappy fate.  Two of the men face forward, although they appear to be almost stationary, while the other four move in a circle around them, each one facing in a different direction.  Whatever position the viewer takes around this group of figures, there is always at least one face and one hand or arm gesture in view.  The sense of despair is inescapable, as the group confronts their collective, impending doom, so too the palpable dignity of the men.  The work is not just an homage to these six well-to-do burghers of Calais, but also a monument to honour French citizens of more recent history.  The work was made in the late 1880s, less than twenty years after the humiliation of France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1871. 

The story behind the work takes place during the early part of the Hundred Years War, when the French and English kings fought for control over large tracts of land in France.  In 1346, Edward III’s troops laid siege to the city of Calais, which he wanted to control in order to make secure his supply route across the Channel.  Under orders from the French king, Philip VI, the city refused to surrender and held out for almost a year, until finally capitulating in August 1347 to avoid the starvation of all remaining inhabitants.  Under the terms of the surrender, the English king promised to spare the lives of the defeated townspeople if six of their number volunteered to give themselves up as prisoners, with ropes tied around their necks, bringing with them the key to the city gate.  When they presented themselves, the King announced his intention to behead them, pour encourager les autres.  At that moment, his wife Philippa, the niece of the French king, pleaded for mercy and Edward granted her wish and spared them.  This account was documented in the fourteenth century by the French historian, Jean Froissart, and these six men became eternal symbols of French bravery in the face of a cruel enemy. 

While there is more evidence to support this story than the legends of King Arthur, modern historians are sceptical about the details of Froissart’s account.  He would have been fourteen when the siege took place and, therefore, he was dependent upon the word of others for his version of events.  He was born in Valenciennes, a town in the Calais region and, therefore, had reason to exaggerate the bravery of the local burghers.  Queen Philippa, also born in Valenciennes, became his patron when he first began to write history and, therefore, he had reason to flatter her involvement in the act of clemency shown by her husband.  It now seems more likely that when the surrender of the city was negotiated, it was agreed that a penitential ritual would be performed, in which six leading burghers would emerge with the city key, dressed as if they were being led to the gallows, but knowing that their reprieval was assured.  This rite allowed the victorious English King both to celebrate his military success and to demonstrate his mercy.  Calais remained an English possession until 1558. 

When I look into the faces of Rodin’s burghers, in the work which the citizens of Calais commissioned him to make to memorialise their forebears, does it matter that the story he had learned about an event that took place half a millennium earlier was mostly a fiction?  Does it make any difference whether Eustache de Saint Pierre and his five fellow volunteers believed that they might be executed or knew that they would be reprieved?  Regardless of their immediate future, they had endured close to a year of fighting, disrupted lives, shortages of food, and fear for the future; now, they were defeated men, forced to perform a ritual of surrender and penitence.  Does it matter that their courage and dignity was partly performative? 

There are some artworks for which context matters.  To understand the work, we need to know when it was made, and by whom, and what the original reason or purpose of the work was.  In the absence of this information, the work loses much of its value and meaning because the circumstances of its origin are central to our appreciation of it.   I think this is true of fiction and poetry as well as of painting and sculpture.  Such works might be interesting and impressive, but only when we understand the context can we grasp the truth to which these works attest.   This is why literary criticism and art history are important: they help to maintain the value and interest of texts and images for each new generation of readers and viewers.  There are other artworks – considerably fewer, only the greatest – for which the context does not matter.  These works speak to us directly, without need of intermediation, because their truth is self-evident.  Knowing the artist’s intentions might add to our enjoyment of the work, but it is supererogatory. 

What makes an artwork a great artwork?  According to Rilke, who for a time worked as Rodin’s secretary, beauty is always something added to that which is already there, and what that something is we do not know.  At first this seems an unhelpful comment, a purported explanation that in practice explains nothing.  On a second reading, it is an illuminating remark: beauty is not a formal feature of the artwork, according to Rilke, but something extraordinary that we find hard to describe, which elevates the work beyond its purely formal features.  These formal features would include not just the materials from which the work was made, but the intellectual sources that inspired the artist when making the work.  Knowing Dante’s account of Francesca and Paolo, or Froissart’s account of Edward and Philippa, adds something to our experience of Rodin’s sculpture, but it is neither essential to the recognition of the greatness of these works, nor to the pleasure of spending time enjoying their beauty.

Rodin’s best work requires nothing more than our eyes, our time, and our imagination; and deserves nothing less.