The first sculpture that championed female sexual liberation

The modern-day viewer will most likely look at this sculpture and think, “Finally, a woman is taking centre stage and playing an equal part in this moment of passion”. But at the time, it didn’t go down too well. In order to understand why, looking at the story of the sculpture and how it came about is crucial.

The sculpture features two fictional characters, those being Paolo and Francesca, taken from the Italian poet Dante’s epic poem Inferno, from The Divine Comedy. On his journey through hell, Dante meets the couple in the second circle, reserved for the lustful. The story goes that the two fell in love while reading stories of courtly love to one another. However, Francesca was married to Paolo’s brother, and when he discovered the affair, he killed them both. The pair, who were real people and contemporaries of Dante in 13th-century Italy, have inspired countless works of art because of the universal human experience of irresistible lust and unexpected betrayals.

You can find the sculpture in the Rodin Museum in Paris, and I highly suggest visiting on your next trip. It occupies a prominent position in one of the main rooms and is instantly visible once you enter the building. This creates quite an uncomfortable feeling for the viewer, as it feels like you have walked in on an intimate moment you don’t belong in. This is emphasised by the entangled bodies of the lovers who physically envelope each other, just like their desire for one another.

The sense of active and dynamic passion was successfully established by the skilled Rodin, who created movement through the diagonals of the arms and legs that spiral upwards. The variety of chisel marks and textures deployed by the artist also adds a palpability to the sculpture. He created a raw marble base, leaving it untouched to mimic the ground and then a polished, smooth texture for the figures. In typical Rodin fashion, there’s very little negative space, meaning that the sculpture feels incredibly solid and creates the idea that the figures are springing out of the ground, creatures of Earth.

The figures are stripped bare, portrayed in their purest carnal and naked form, adding to the vulnerability and intimacy of this sacred moment. The only object present is the book that is slipping out of Paolo’s hand. This references the love stories that brought the pair together. However, at this moment, even that no longer matters.

Looking closely, we can see Rodin’s interest in exploring the female sexual experience, as she seems even more keen on the love-making than the more reserved male figure. As the former Whitechapel Gallery director, Catherine Lampert, noted, “Rodin was one of the first artists to be curious about the sexual experience of women”.

Although the sculpture was originally commissioned by the French government—quite osé if you ask me—several copies were made for other commissions, one even in bronze. By 1917, over 300 casts had been made of the sculpture.

One of these bronze duplicates was commissioned for the 1893 Chicago World Fair, but once delivered, it was considered too unsuitable for general display and thus was relegated to an inner chamber with admission only by personal application. How extreme! Then, over a century later, when The Kiss was introduced to the Tate Britain’s central rotunda, the sculpture was even more criticised and moved to a new gallery, placed right next to the toilets…

When the artist Cornelia Parker took part in the Tate’s Triennial exhibition in 2003, she decided to return the sculpture to its original place, except she wrapped it up in a mile-long piece of string that draped over the sculpture like thick cloth, obscuring the faces of the figures. According to Parker, this artistic decision was a nod to Surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp, who did the same at an exhibition in New York in 1942, naming the installation ‘His Twine’. He obscured the art, making it excessively complicated and frustrating for the viewer to look at.

Parker adopted this technique because she wanted to “give [the sculpture] back the complication it used to have: that relationships can be tortured, and not just this romantic ideal. So the string stood in for the complications of relationships.”

Perhaps Parker wanted to re-ignite the debate and controversy over the female agency in the sculpture. Today, we are so used to seeing art that feels sexually empowering and liberating for women. Examples like Tracy Emin’s My Bed, the Guerrilla Girls, or even in the Middle East, with Shirin Nishat’s photography. However, this wasn’t so normalised during Rodin’s time, and the public scandal of the sculpture proves just how powerful the patriarchal ideology operated in the late 19th century and how hard the fight against it has been.

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