Seoulscapade

The Rodin museum in Seoul is located among the Samsung buildings near City Hall. It’s just down from the Namdaemoon Gate. I’ve visited the gallery a couple of times when I’ve been in the area. From memory, the glassed in section you see in the photo above is free, but you have to pay to enter the gallery behind that.

As a keen Dante enthusiast (my PhD involved Dante), I was thrilled when I heard about the existence of this museum because it houses a cast of Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, which was inspired by Dante. Specifically, the scenes depicted on this sculpture are based on Dante’s Inferno. I’d never seen a real cast of it before so I made my way there pretty quickly after hearing about it.

The sculpture is actually a massive doorway, originally commission to form the main door of a proposed museum in Paris. The museum project, however, failed.

Most people know Rodin’s The Thinker, well, he’s present in this sculpture as well, centrally located at the top of the doorway. Here’s a close up:

But of all the scenes depicted from Inferno, where does the thinker fit in? Apparently, it’s Dante himself, as Rodin remarked: the figure is “Dante thinking of the plan of the poem behind him… all the characters from the Divine Comedy.”

Ugolino is among the many characters or souls from Dante’s hell that Rodin cast in bronze. He’s a soul in hell who tells Dante how he was forced to cannibalize his own children, who had died from starvation, whilst they were all imprisoned together. In hell, he is locked in ice with his captor and for all eternity gnaws at his captor’s head in reprisal. Stark and brutal, it’s one of my favorite moments in the poem. We see Ugolino below in the sculpture with the kids.

As far as I know, there are only ever two sculptures permanently housed in the glassed in section of this gallery, The Gates of Hell and Rodin’s Burghers of Calais. The Burghers of Calais was also impressive to see up close for the first time, a sculptural tribute to heroic sacrifice. It really gives a good idea of Rodin’s confronting realism. Apparently, this cast is the last of only 12 that were allowed after Rodin’s death.

Here is a close up:

The first time I went to the museum there was a Rodin exhibition as well (picture taking was not allowed), which presumably moved on after a few months. Altogether it was an enjoyable way to spend a Saturday afternoon in Seoul.