How Rodin found beauty in deformity

Art and science seem chalk and cheese in our own time, but scroll back 150 years and they were enthusiastic bedfellows. Any swish soirée in Vienna or Paris would have included as many neurologists as novelists, and nobody batted an eyelid when, in London in August 1881, specimens relating to a lavish medical congress were exhibited next to the Royal Academy of Art in a temporary “museum”.

The most popular item on display was the ghoulish wax cast of a 60-year-old woman with locomotor ataxia: a newly identified condition that accompanies the tertiary stage of syphilis and causes grotesque degeneration of the joints. The patient’s doctor, Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893), had made the cast in the hours after her death. He brought it with him, together with her skeleton, all the way from France – which no doubt gave customs a fright.

“My wax lady has made a sensation,” Charcot wrote to his wife in Paris, where the cast was already affectionately known among regulars at his Tuesday salons in the city’s Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, as the “Ataxic Venus”. The cast had pride of place, too, in the Musée Charcot that the neurologist had set up in the late 1870s, a sort of medical cabinet of curiosities filled with bits of tibia and vertebrae, drawings, photographs and models – even, on occasion, living patients.

People came from all over the world to see the Musée Charcot, including Sigmund Freud and the psychologist William James. For the sculptor Auguste Rodin, however, it was only a short walk, and he visited again and again. As a new exhibition opening this month at Tate Modern reveals, Rodin’s friendship with Charcot, together with the extraordinary crop of medical imagery circulating in Paris at the time, had a profound impact on the sculptor’s practice.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Rodin’s fascination with diseased, deformed bodies was the key that unleashed the radical style with which he expressed, in plaster, marble and bronze, the peculiar anxieties of his age. This tantalising connection was discovered by art historian Natasha Ruiz-Gómez when leafing through 19th-century press clippings at the Rodin archive in Paris. She was struck, she tells me, “that people at the time were talking about his sculpture using the language of medicine – of pathology”.

Today, Charcot is not familiar outside medical circles, partly because in later life he threw his lot in with hypnotism, tarnishing his reputation. In Rodin’s time, however, he was a medical superstar who appeared so often in the popular press that, in 1885, the critic Octave Mirbeau wrote that this was not “the century of Victor Hugo nor the century of Napoleon, but the century of Charcot”.

Charcot was renowned for having identified various neurological disorders, among them multiple sclerosis and neuropathic arthropathy (known today as “Charcot Joint”), though arguably his controversial investigations into so-called “hysteria”, as part of which he “exhibited” his female patients in a sort of open laboratory, played a meatier role. The goings-on at the Salpêtrière hospital, which housed 5,000 women by the time Charcot made it famous, even featured in tourist guidebooks, to be ticked off alongside a visit to the Louvre or the Tuileries.

When Charcot became “chef de clinique” at Pitié-Salpêtrière in 1856, Rodin was only 16 – two years into his studies at the “Petite Ecole” for decorative arts. Among his teachers was the well-known animal painter Antoine-Louis Barye, though more important was Rodin’s exposure to the Musée Dupuytren a few doors down, where grisly jarred specimens illustrating disease or deformity glinted in the dark.

By the 1860s, Rodin had failed three times to get into the prestigious école des Beaux-Arts (his escape from its stifling curriculum was a blessing in disguise). Instead, he took a lowly job as a modeller for the sculptor Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, and returned often to the Dupuytren to sketch. Here, as at the Musée Charcot, wax body parts were rested artfully upon, or wrapped in, white cloth, giving viewers the impression, as Ruiz-Gómez explains, that they were enjoying “a partial view of a whole body [...] a privileged peek”.

Rodin made many partial figure sculptures – mutinously so, since previously a sculpture was only thought finished if it was a complete figure. Critics often compared these works – as they did his tiny sculptures of hands, limbs and the like, which he called “giblets” – to exhibits in museums of anatomy and pathology. No delicate white cloths for Rodin, though: rather as a butcher might hang a joint of meat, he strung up in his studio a plaster cast of a severed hand, sinews and blood vessels tumbling from the wrist.

We do not know exactly when Rodin and Charcot met, but by the 1870s, Rodin was part of an intellectual circle that included one of Charcot’s protégés at the hospital. Ruiz-Gómez believes the two men came into contact at the home of Charcot’s stepdaughter, Marie. She and her husband – the doctor and politician Henri Liouville – became friends with Rodin around 1883, and when she remarried five years later (Liouville died in 1887), Rodin was a guest at the wedding, as he was at Charcot’s son’s (to Victor Hugo’s granddaughter), in 1896.

This entrenched, quarter-century-long relationship would have given Rodin exceptional and intimate exposure to the doctor’s thinking. It would be strange if some of it had not filtered into Rodin’s own – and indeed Charcot’s particular visual method of enquiry virtually handed to Rodin, on a plate, a solution to his search for new forms.

Charcot was an artist manqué, his drawing skill noted in school records. He actually considered taking it up full time, though was persuaded by his father that medicine was the better option for the family’s finances.

His artistic grounding played a part in the way he ruled his domain at Salpêtrière, where his sophisticated laboratories included a photography studio, a casting studio (where he made his Ataxic Venus), and even a resident artist: Paul Richer. The aim of all this was to substantiate, and extend, Charcot’s belief in the visual classification of symptoms. By dividing diseases into stages, and cataloguing the appearance or postures of each, he and Richer hoped to create a universal diagnostic model.

The images, charts and “sculptures” that they produced brought a new visual vocabulary into circulation and Rodin was not the only artist to be influenced by it. The frenetic gesticulations, thrusting chests and arching backs doing the rounds in louche cabaret performances at the city’s “cafe-concerts”, which found their way into the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec, were influenced by the iconography of Salpêtrière, just as despair over disease and the perceived degeneration of society more widely (of which hysteria was a symptom) wriggled deep into the contemporaneous novels of émile Zola and Honoré de Balzac.

Some of Rodin’s hand “giblets” echo casts in the Musée Charcot depicting rheumatoid arthritis – the thumb locked in the shape of a Z, the fingertips angled towards the palm – but Salpêtrière’s influence is most obvious in The Gates of Hell – the pair of bronze doors inspired by Dante’s Inferno that Rodin began in 1880 and worked on until his death, turning some of its 180-figures into standalone sculptures. The Kiss and The Thinker both began life there.

To create his modern vision of Hell, Rodin plundered the physical postures of hysteria – then thought to have been “caused” by the modern world, with its metropolises and crowds – which Charcot and co were busy photographing and drawing at Salpêtrière. The resemblance is uncanny – even caricaturists felt able to portray an exhibition of Rodin’s sculptures in the manner of Charcot’s patients.

Rodin would continue to draw on sickness and its physical manifestation for the rest of his life. In 1911, he told the author Paul Gsell, with whom he collaborated on a book of his teachings: “We call ugly whatever is deformed, whatever is unhealthy, whatever suggests the ideas of disease, of debility, or of suffering, whatever is contrary to regularity, which is the sign and condition of health and strength... But let a great artist or a great writer make use of one or the other of these uglinesses, instantly it is transfigured.”

The word “transfigured” here is key. Illness might have suggested to Rodin the “inner truth” that he was after – essentially a means by which he could connect, unmediated, with nature, bypassing the easy sentimentality and stale tropes of his predecessors. But ultimately Rodin’s sculptures served a different purpose to their medical source material. His genius was to transform bodily illness into psychological, and in doing so, he captured the anxieties of his age.

The EY Exhibition: The Making of Rodin is at Tate Modern from May 17. Telegraph subscribers can claim 2-for-1 tickets at: telegraph.co.uk/go/rodin