The Gates of Hell

The Gates of Hell (French: La Porte de l'Enfer) is a monumental bronze sculptural group work by the French artist Auguste Rodin that depicts a scene from the Inferno, the first section of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. It stands at 6 metres high, 4 metres wide and 1 metre deep (19.7×13.1×3.3 ft) and contains 180 figures.

Several casts of the work were made, which are now in various locations around the world. Rodin's original plaster model is in the Musée D'Orsay, Paris. The figures range from 15 centimetres (6 in) high up to more than one metre (3 ft). Several of the figures were also cast as independent free-standing statues.

The sculpture was commissioned by the Directorate of Fine Arts in 1880. Rodin worked on and off on this project for thirty-seven years, continuously adding, removing, or altering over two hundred human figures on the doors, until his death in 1917.

The Directorate asked for an inviting entrance to a planned Decorative Arts Museum with the theme being left to Rodin's selection. Even before this commission, Rodin had developed sketches of some of Dante's characters based on his admiration of Dante's Inferno.

The Decorative Arts Museum was never built. Rodin worked on this project on the ground floor of the Hôtel Biron. Near the end of his life, Rodin donated sculptures, drawings and reproduction rights to the French government. In 1919, two years after his death, the Hôtel Biron became the Musée Rodin, housing a cast of The Gates of Hell and related works.^{[citation needed]}

Through me the way into the suffering city,
Through me the way to the eternal pain,
Through me the way that runs among the lost.
Justice urged on my high artificer;
My Maker was Divine authority,
The highest Wisdom, and the primal Love.
Before me nothing but eternal things
Were made, and I endure eternally.
Abandon every hope, who enter here.

Rodin conceived that people would walk toward the work, perhaps up a flight of stairs, and be overwhelmed frontally by the massive gates, contemplating the experience of hell that Dante describes in his Inferno. Rodin thought particularly of Dante's warning over the entrance of the Inferno, "Abandon every hope, who enter here."

A work of the scope of The Gates of Hell had not been attempted before, but inspiration came from Lorenzo Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise at the Baptistery of St. John, Florence, 15th century bronze doors depicting figures from the Old Testament. Another source of inspiration was medieval cathedrals combining high and low relief. Rodin was also inspired by Michelangelo's fresco The Last Judgment, Delacroix's painting The Barque of Dante, Balzac's collection La Comédie humaine and Baudelaire's poems Les Fleurs du mal.