The Wanderers: Stanford's Rodin Sculpture Garden

Our destination was the Stanford Theater in Palo Alto, and cousin Barbara suggested a short drive around a section of the Stanford University campus before the double feature at the theater.

The 285-foot Hoover Tower, completed in 1941 to celebrate the University's 50th anniversary, is part of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. The Stanford-affiliated public policy research center was founded by Herbert Hoover, a member of the University's pioneer class of 1895 and the 31st president of the United States. The Tower is a landmark for students, alumni and the local community.

When it first opened its doors to the public in 1894, the Leland Stanford Jr. Museum was unique among American museums, having been privately founded by a family with a general collection of world

art on a par with the great public museums being built at the time. By the turn of the century, the Stanford museum was the largest privately-owned museum building in the world. Its archeological and ethnological holdings were a rarity on the Pacific Coast, and by 1905 its collection of Asian materials was unsurpassed in the western United States.

The Center's exhibition presents its entire Rodin collection, 200 works in all. The Cantor Arts Center's collection of Rodin bronzes is among the largest in the world. The majority of the collection occupies three ground-floor galleries. Approximately 170 works by Rodin are on view inside the Center, mostly cast bronze, but also works in wax, plaster, and terra cotta.

Twenty bronzes, including The Gates of Hell on which Rodin worked for two decades, are outside in the Sculpture Garden.

“In the nineteenth century, the old audit office stood on the site of the Orsay railway station. After its destruction by fire in 1871, during the Commune, there were plans to replace it with a museum of the decorative arts. In 1888, the State commissioned Rodin to design monumental doors for the entrance to the museum. They were to be decorated with eleven low reliefs representing Dante's Divine Comedy. Rodin took his inspiration from the famous doors that Ghiberti had made for the baptistery in Florence in the fifteenth century.

"Three years later, he was satisfied with his initial model, but the plans for the museum were abandoned. The discarded doors became a creative reservoir for Rodin, providing many groups of figures which were finally detached from the whole, such as The Thinker and The Kiss.

"The Gates of Hell, which only a few privileged critics had been allowed to see, then took on symbolic value: of Rodin's boundless creative genius for some, of his inability to finish anything, for others. It was not exhibited until the Great Exhibition of 1900 and even then in an unfinished state.

“At the top of the Gates, the group of the three Shades is, in fact, in an extremely modern approach, the triple repetition of the same figure with one arm missing. Shown below is a large sculpture of The Three Shades found nearby.

The Three Shades

On the pier, The Thinker (Dante himself) is on the brink of the abyss.

On the right-hand panel we can see Ugolino. On the left, Paolo and Francesca are among the tumbling bodies. Everything emerges from seething lava. The convulsed attitudes convey despair, grief and malediction.