Auguste Rodin was so skilled that critics accused him of cheating by casting a living man in plaster. This episode follows the working-class Parisian who was rejected three times by the École des Beaux-Arts, spent nearly twenty years as a commercial craftsman making architectural ornaments, briefly tried to become a monk after his sister’s death, and then returned from a trip to Italy transformed by Michelangelo. His Age of Bronze triggered the casting-from-life scandal, and his spiteful response was to sculpt St. John the Baptist at six feet seven inches tall.

We unpack the forty-year obsession with the Gates of Hell, where The Thinker began as a small figure on a door, the town of Calais’s outrage at six terrified burghers placed at ground level, the humiliation of the Balzac monument, and Rodin’s later Frankenstein method of assembling fragments into works like The Walking Man. We also confront the darker side of his biography, including his relationship with Camille Claudel and the neglect of those closest to him.

• Why decades of commercial ornament work taught Rodin things the Academy never could
• How St. John the Baptist combines two phases of a single step to create the illusion of walking
• The pointing machine and the team of assistants that scaled small clay figures into monumental bronzes
• How the Balzac monument went from public laughingstock to a precursor of 20th-century abstraction
• The irony that the artist once accused of faking his work is now one of the most forged in history