Dome

Overall side view on plinth in pond; Rodin must have been very impressed by Carpeaux’s Ugolino (1861, Musée d’Orsay), the famous sculpture whose dramatic subject was drawn from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Twenty years later, after receiving the commission for The Gates of Hell, he made several sketches of this Dantesque theme dear to the Romantics: imprisoned, driven crazy by hunger, Ugolino, Count of Gheradesca, devoured his dead children, a crime for which he was eternally damned. This bronze was created as an enlargement of the Gates group in ca. 1904 and the large-scale bronze now stands in the pool in the gardens of the Hôtel Biron. Source: Musée Rodin [website]; http://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/ (accessed 6/18/2015)