Rodin being an impressionist created the sculpture in true human form. The audience can feel the passion, love, and true happiness as the two embrace in their first kiss. Knowing their story, we can see the fragility of love, in that once love is found it can easily be lost.
The passionate love of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta was a theme which Rodin used to inspire The Kiss. Although it was originally intended to be part of the Gates of Hell, Rodin did not feel that it fit and removed the figures to make them an individual statue. The form of the lovers emerges from the highlights and shadows of the statue. Light and shade were used by Rodin to create an impression of actuality.
The convulsive contraction of the toes on the man's right foot and the tenseness of his hand in contrast to the woman's thigh. Such details reveal much of the passion that inflames the lovers, but they reveal it with taste and refinement.
Rodin's sculpture combined both the realistic and romantic tendencies present in French society at the time. In his work he aimed to capture and represent inner feeling and the subsequent state of mind.
Rodin was a believer in the power of art. He believed that art was on par with religion and that through art you could say all that could be said about the relationship between man and the world. Rodin also wanted nature to be the influence behind his work, but was more interested in the simplicity and beauty of the natural form of the human body
His subject as in all his work is the human form. His style tends to vary between either a deliberate roughness of form to a very polished and delicate approach of modelling the body. When I saw the kiss at the Tate, it captured me, and i was looking in awe, at how much detail was evident in the sculpture aswell as the passion involved.
Wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke of this masterpiece: “One has the impression of seeing the delight of this kiss all over these bodies; it is like a sun which rises and its light is everywhere.”
