A carnal carving by the inimitable French sculptor Auguste Rodin. The sensual scene, titled Eternal Idol, features two of some two hundred figures created as part of the artist’s vast sculptural project The Gates of Hell, inspired by Dante’s Inferno. “The title is puzzling,” Harvard Art Museums ponder. “Women were often described as ‘idols’ in 19th-century poetry; the woman here may be only an ideal, in spite of her cool, fleshly presence.” Meanwhile, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote of them, “A mysterious greatness emanates from this group… One doesn’t dare assign a meaning to it… A heaven is near, but is not yet attained; a hell is near, and not yet forgotten.”
