One of the nineteenth century’s most innovative sculptors, Rodin is often referred to as the first modern sculptor because of his concern with the materiality of form. The Kiss appears timeless, a lasting manifestation of the academic nude which succeeds in delicately balancing the ideal and the erotic. Originally part of a larger commission, The Gates of Hell, illustrating Dante’s Inferno, The Kiss depicts the adulterous lovers Paolo and Francesca in their first embrace. The Kiss was produced at the beginning of the century at a time of great experimentation, during which the treatment of the figure would be radically transformed.