The Thinker (Le Penseur) is a bronze sculpture by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin.
Rodin made this famous creation in 1881. It was in that year that Rodin got his first official Parisian order: a monumental bronze door for a future Museum of Decorative Arts. This "Gate of Hell" was conceived to Dante's Divine Comedy.
The Thinker was for the central pediment, while the accented musculature and the concentrated expression of Michelangelo's statue evoced the tomb figures in the Florentine Basilica of San Lorenzo.
The Thinker is also called Le Poète, because the image is actually supposed to represent the meditator Dante.
The Thinker by Rodin was the first work that was exhibited in a public place. On April 21 1906 up to the Pantheon was during a fierce political and social crisis, making the image was a socialist symbol. In 1922 the statue with its pedestal was transferred to the garden of the Hôtel Biron, the current Rodin Museum. Another copy is in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen. Another copy is at the tomb of Rodin in Meudon.
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