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 7 ...