Their forms—whether sketches on paper, plasters, terracottas, bronzes, marbles, engravings or photographic reproductions, unfinished or completed works—do not compete. Gathered at the Louvre across centuries and geography between Rome, Florence, Paris or Meudon, they do not challenge one another like on a boxing ring, despite their power.
Rather, they commune. As in a church, but with the ancient gods as arbiters, and also Dante with his Christian paradise and hell, profoundly human.
In carefully crafted lighting and scenography, which sets these very diverse media in dialogue—from display cases filled with tiny workshop “offcuts” to the colossal figures of Moses and Balzac—Michelangelo Buonarroti, known as Michelangelo (1475–1564), and Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) seem to be able to say everything, from being to nothingness, to each other.
It’s not a problem that the Italian monuments of the former never travel. The encounter in the Hall Napoléon is sublime. It has been organized by Chloé Ariot…
