The most recognizable image of intellectual contemplation in the world was modeled by a bare-knuckle prize fighter who brawled in the red light district of Paris. This episode traces the biography of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, which began in 1880 as a small figure called The Poet perched above the Gates of Hell, a monumental door commission inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. We examine the debate over whether the figure was meant to be Dante himself, why Rodin insisted on heroic nudity, and how foundry workers casually renamed the piece after Michelangelo’s brooding statue of Lorenzo de’ Medici.

We then look at the body of Jean Baud, the wrestler whose dense musculature let Rodin sculpt thinking as physical exertion, with a twisted torso, right elbow on left thigh, and toes gripping the rock. In 1902 Rodin enlarged the figure from about 72 centimeters to 181 and placed it on a high plinth, making it his first standalone public artwork. From there the sculpture spread through bronze casting into roughly 29 monumental versions worldwide, one of which carried a Christie’s estimate of up to 14 million euros in 2022, and into parody by Charlie Chaplin, painting by Edvard Munch, and slapstick in Night at the Museum 2.

• Why a bronze cast is an original rather than a copy, and how that let the image go viral before the internet
• The 1904 public subscription that paid for the Paris cast, first placed before the Pantheon
• Chaplin’s alteration of the pose into a fascist salute in The Great Dictator
• Prehistoric thinkers from Karditsa, Cernavoda, and Yehud that predate Rodin by thousands of years
• The unbroken chain from Neolithic clay to Michelangelo to Rodin, and why we picture deep thought as exhausting