Cathedral by Auguste Rodin
"I obey Nature in everything, and I never pretend to command her. My only ambition is to be servilely faithful to her."
"Nevertheless," [Rodin's interviewer] answered with some malice, "it is not nature exactly as it is that you evoke in your work."
He stopped short, the damp cloth in his hands. "Yes, exactly as it is!" he replied frowning.
"You are obliged to alter-- "
"Not a jot!"
"But after all, the proof that you do change it is this, that the cast would give not at all the same impression as your work."
He reflected an instant and said: "That is so! Because the cast is less true than my sculpture! It would be impossible for any model to keep an animated pose during all the time that it would take to make a cast from it. But I keep in my mind the ensemble of the pose and I insist that the model shall conform to my memory of it. More than that, -- the cast only reproduces the exterior; I reproduce, besides that, the spirit which is certainly also a part of nature. I see all the truth, and not only that of the outside. I accentuate the lines which best express the spiritual state that I interpret."
-- Auguste Rodin Rodin on Art and Artists
Translated by Mrs. Romilly Fedden
