The Three Shades at The Musée Rodin, Paris

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In Rodin's masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, three identical figures stand at the entrance to Hell, pointing to a haunting inscription: "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." Before creating this iconic work, Rodin made several studies of shades, eventually deciding to assemble three figures that seem to be turning around the same point. He placed them atop The Gates, where they could gaze down at the viewer, then had them enlarged in 1904 to create a monumental independent group. The twisting, tormented pose of The Three Shades borrows from Michelangelo's Adam, and it's clear that Rodin was influenced by the master sculptor. The angle at which the heads fall downward is so exaggerated that the necks and shoulders form an almost horizontal line. This anatomical distortion gave Rodin a unique expressive force unparalleled in his time. By assembling three casts of a single figure, Rodin achieved the painter's advantage: the margins become engaged intervals, yielding infinite rhythmic amplifications. In her essay "Rodin's Gates of Hell," Aida Audeh points to Canto XVI as the literary source of The Shades and their threefold appearance on top of The Gates. In this part of the poem, Dante meets the souls of three Florentine men condemned for sodomy, who are exposed to a rain of fire while trying to avoid the scorching heat. In 1887, Cosmo Monkhouse interpreted The Three Shades as a personification of the first three lines of the inscription over the door of Dante's Hell: "The Gate of Despair... By what sad harmony of unlovely lines the artist has quelled our natural aversion to such a sight." Rodin's group is not just a tour de force; it shows the operation of his born artistic faculty, which conveys power and idealism in the plainest sense of the word. This object is part of "Scan The World," a non-profit initiative introduced by MyMiniFactory. Scan The World aims to create a digital archive of fully 3D printable sculptures, artworks, and landmarks from across the globe for public access. If you have interesting items around you and would like to contribute, email stw@myminifactory.com to find out how you can help.