You’ve Got To Hand It To Rodin

My eyes kept going back to the hand, so tender and gently placed that you could forget these were bodies forged from marble.

For all of the grabbing passion and sexual infatuation of Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss, the hands always seemed to suggest something much softer and loving.

The woman, leaning back and on the edge of the rough base stone, could easily slip.

But without any grabbing or force, his hand steadies her.

His palm and thumb hover over her leg, and the only touch is by the tips of his fingers, as if she is breakable and precious.

The bodies embrace haphazardly, but the hands are patient and deliberate.

The lovers were modeled after the adulterous lovers, Francesca and Paulo, from Dante’s Divine Comedy.

But I could never feel anything doomed or sinful about the pair.

All I saw was the tension between the hesitancy and the urgency of a first kiss—the feeling of fear and desire all wrapped up in one. 

The Kiss was my first introduction to the works of Rodin.

From then on, I became fascinated by the stone figures Rodin seemed to capture in motion, as well as the depths of feeling he built from the subtle details of the body.

My first summer in Philadelphia, I spent many afternoons journeying to the Rodin Museum, sitting in the sculpture garden or wandering the small rooms to take in the subtleties.

Just like with The Kiss, my eyes are always drawn to the hands. 

Writing on his weeks spent observing Rodin, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45605/45605-h/45605-h.htm">wrote,