RODIN, Auguste
(b. 1840, Paris, d. 1917, Meudon)

Adam (detail)

1880 (model), c. 1910 (cast)
Bronze
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Adam is one of a series of powerful male nudes that established Rodin as a major sculptor in the 1870s and early 1880s. Of these, Adam offers the clearest homage to Michelangelo, whose marbles and Sistine ceiling frescoes, Rodin had passionately admired and studied in Italy before he returned home in 1876. Adam's extended right forefinger alludes to the awakening gesture in Michelangelo's painted Creation scene.