Answer — Friday Foto Quiz #18

Yes, this is “The Thinker” by Rodin. If you are good with Wikipedia and Google Maps, you could pos­i­tive­ly iden­ti­fy the loca­tion from the see­saw sign in the back­ground. Scroll down for more.

Orig­i­nal­ly named “The Poet”, the sculp­ture por­trays Dante con­tem­plat­ing his poem about the gates of hell  depict­ed below at the same loca­tion.

These pic­tures were tak­en at the Rodin Muse­um in Philadel­phia. There are 10 full size bronze ver­sions of The Thinker in the Unit­ed States, 2 of them in the bay area at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty and the Legion of Hon­or in San Fran­cis­co.

The muse­um in Philly had a large col­lec­tion of hand sculp­tures. I knew lit­tle about bronze sculp­tures before this vis­it. The orig­i­nals were carved in wax which are then used to cre­ate molds which in turn were used to cast the hol­low bronze stat­ues. A com­plex series of levers is used to exact­ly dupli­cate a sculp­ture into oth­er sizes. The orig­i­nal wax ver­sions are even­tu­al­ly lost.

The Ben­jamin Franklin Park­way in Philadel­phia hosts a great num­ber of excel­lent art, his­to­ry and sci­ence muse­ums. Check­’um out.

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