Musee Rodin (or, Hell is in the Details)

After a most delectable lunch of galettes and cider with Christina and Johnathan at a creperie called Josselin, we went over to the Rodin museum to get our sculpture on.




The weather turned before long.



So we just took that opportunity to go to the indoor part of the museum (converted from the residence where Rodin lived for several years toward the end of his life).

For this next one, I pretended to be shooting a sculpture but got a nice shot of Cory peeking around it

It was a fantastic museum, of course. I wasn't too shutter-happy inside, but when we went back outside, I got drawn into the Gates of Hell pretty deep.

Like Milton and Marlow, Bosch and Goethe and (especially) Dante, Rodin had a special fascination with the infernal, and and it was the subject of some of his best work.

I'm the first to admit that it can damage the experience (and be just plain annoying) to spend one's travels totally focused on taking photographs or shooting video. But by the same token, if you maintain a balance, the camera can help you pay attention to visual elements in a number of ways. I spent a lot of time on this trip engaging with details in some fairly grand works of art and architecture.

You can see the raindrops on the bronze in some of these - it rained pretty hard while we were inside, and it sprinkled on and off when we went back out too.

Rodin worked directly from Dante's Inferno to make this masterpiece, and he incorporated elements of some of his other major sculptures.

It was a pretty wonderful museum experience. This was mid-afternoon on our second day there.

I'll leave you for now with a reminder that the Eiffel Tower should never be interpreted to have any phallic significance whatsoever.