Saint John the Baptist

For his John the Baptist Rodin chose an anti-classicist composition with an unusual spiral movement of the body. This enabled him to emphasize the tension between firmly anchored feet and the body and hond turned against the dominant gesture of the left hand. As many other works by Rodin, this too was rejected by contemporaneous critics. Although firmly convinced of his ability to breathe new life into sculpture with his new ideas, Rodin had to wait another twenty years for his well-deserved appreciation. Some contemporaries saw in John the Baptist some autobiographical elements-the misunderstood forerunner, whose message was to materialize sometime in the future, was not only Rodin’s personal motif- it stood for the ethos of the entire avant-garde.