Photos

Subjective note:
During my second visit to Bruges, I also had the chance to visit a Rodin Reproductions Exhibition held in Belfort. The point that they were not the original artworks gave the exhibitors great oppotunities to better capture his works, with no warnings of "no flash please, no tripods please, don't touch please" etc. Here a a bronze and a plaster reproduction of The Kiss, placed in diagonal distance to each other.

PP note:
Here, I applied sepia to increase the dramatic effect of timeless love, and gave a blur to the large part of the pic with focus on the black love of death as it is reality and sharp, choosing to leave the white love of crude happiness in unknown depths of existance.

Objective note:
The Kiss is a marble sculpture by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Like many of Rodin's best-known individual sculptures, including The Thinker, the embracing couple depicted in the sculpture appeared originally as part of a group of reliefs decorating Rodin's monumental bronze portal The Gates of Hell, commissioned for a planned museum of art in Paris. The couple were later removed from the Gates and replaced with another pair of lovers located on the smaller right-hand column.

Before creating the marble version of The Kiss, Rodin produced several smaller sculptures in plaster, terracotta and bronze. The sculpture was originally titled Francesca da Rimini, as it depicts the 13th-century Italian noblewoman immortalised in Dante's Inferno (Circle 2, Canto 5) who falls in love with her husband Giovanni Malatesta's younger brother Paolo. Having fallen in love while reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, the couple are discovered and killed by Francesca's husband.