Auguste Rodin

French sculptor (1840–1917). In "Eye and Mind" §4, Rodin is MP's primary interlocutor on the problem of movement in painting and sculpture. Rodin's theory of the "paradoxical arrangement" — depicting the body in an attitude it never at any instant really held — provides MP with the key to movement's visibility: "Movement is given... by an image in which the arms, the legs, the trunk, and the head are each taken at a different instant." This is not photographic accuracy but artistic truth: "It is the artist who is truthful, while the photograph is mendacious; for, in reality, time never stops cold" (via Gsell, L'art, 1911).

Key Points

• The paradoxical arrangement: the sculpted body is "in an attitude which it never at any instant really held," imposing "fictive linkages between the parts" — yet this alone makes transition and duration arise in bronze and on canvas
• Photography is mendacious because it "keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the 'metamorphosis' of time." Painting makes visible what photography freezes
• Géricault's horses "really run on canvas" because they show "the body's grip upon the soil" — temporal ubiquity rather than instantaneous capture
• MP draws the general lesson: "All flesh, and even that of the world, radiates beyond itself" — painting is "always within the carnal"

Connections

• provides the theory of movement for merleau-ponty-1961-eye-and-mind — the paradoxical arrangement as temporal transcendence
• complements paul-cezanne's contribution to depth-profondeur — Cézanne contributes depth and color, Rodin contributes temporal depth (movement)
• contrasts with photographic realism — the artist is truthful because time does not stop cold