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 f ...