The Thinker

A massive nude man sits hunched on a rock, chin on hand, every muscle of his back and legs clenched in the labor of thought. Rodin conceived the figure in 1880 as the poet Dante brooding over The Gates of Hell, then enlarged it to monumental scale, with the first large bronze cast made in 1904. Casts now preside over cities around the world, but the most famous sits in the garden of the Musée Rodin in Paris. Instantly legible and endlessly reproduced, it has become the universal image of thinking itself.