Rodin's re-orientation of eroticism in the drawings after Michelangelo's Medici Chapel, 1876

In narratives of the history of modern art, Rodin's trip to Florence in 1876 has been widely understood to be the turning point in his career and one of the originary moments of modern sculpture. 1 examine three little-discussed drawings Rodin made of Michelangelo's sculptures in the Medici Chapel. In them, Rodin normalized the ambiguously sexed figure of Night and explicitly objectified the figure of the more conventionally rendered Dawn. Contextualizing this discussion in the debates about Michelangelo's sexuality in the late nineteenth century (spurred on by the publication of an unexpurgated edition of his poetry), I argue that the origins of Rodin's foregrounding of sexuality as the primary sign of the subjective in sculpture can be traced to this episode. Namely, Rodin's identification with Michelangelo as the prototypical sculptor of the expressive an his concurrent disidentification with the ambiguities of gender and their implications for Michelangelo's sexuality both contributed to the parameters of Rodin's version of modern sculpture.