The Kiss (Rodin)

The Kiss is a marble sculpture by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, created in 1882, showing an embracing couple identified with Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, the doomed lovers of Dante's Inferno. It began as a relief figure grouping for Rodin's monumental bronze portal The Gates of Hell, commissioned for a planned Paris museum, before the couple was removed from that composition and reworked as an independent marble. The principal marble version is held by the Musee Rodin in Paris, with further marble casts in London and Copenhagen; when shown at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, its erotic content was judged unsuitable for general display and it was restricted to a private viewing room, though it has since become one of the most celebrated images of romantic love in sculpture.