Michelangelo and Rodin as an 'Artistic Couple'

The Louvre Museum in Paris presents a major exhibition pairing Michelangelo and Auguste Rodin as an "artistic couple," curated by Chloé Ariot of the Musée Rodin and Marc Bormand of the Louvre. The show features over 200 works, including three marble sculptures by Michelangelo—the Slaves and a Christ on the Cross—alongside drawings, plaster casts, and works by Rodin such as the monumental Balzac. It also includes pieces by contemporaries and later artists like Joseph Beuys, Jana Sterbak, Giuseppe Penone, and Bruce Nauman to trace the sculptors' shared legacy.

The exhibition matters because it reframes the relationship between the two masters not as simple influence or imitation, but as a deep artistic kinship rooted in common aesthetic choices—the study of the living model, the embrace of the unfinished "non finito," and the freedom to deform and hybridize bodies. By juxtaposing their works and those of later heirs, the show argues that both artists broke from realism to express the imagination, and that their radical approaches continue to resonate with contemporary sculptors. This challenges earlier narratives that focused solely on Rodin as a Michelangelo follower.