The Martyr

Auguste Rodin

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Martyr was originally a standing figure on the lintel of The Gates of Hell. Rodin enlarged it, placed it in a supine position, giving the limbs a convulsive appearance, and heightened the tension by omitting a base and forcing the head and left arm of the figure to hang over the edge of any support provided. Rodin depicts the young woman posed in an attitude of death: her supine body twisted, legs crumpled, head thrown back, and arms outflung. Splayed upon an altar-shaped pedestal, she becomes a symbolic martyr to humanity’s shared fate. Her youth evokes death’s universality, her nakedness its indifference, and her isolation the loneliness of the final struggle.

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.

Metropolitan Museum of Art