Widely considered to be the founder of modern sculpture, François Auguste René Rodin was born in Paris in 1840. He showed a strong artistic aptitude at an early age, and over his lifetime kept up a prodigious output, consisting of thousands of drawings, prints and sculptures. He was widely lauded in his lifetime, although his style was not universally appreciated. Since then his position as one of histories greatest sculptors has been firmly cemented.

One of his most famous works, and most ambitious, was ‘The Gates of Hell’. It’s a monumental bronze sculptural group depicting a scene from Dante’s ‘Inferno’, and stands 6 metres high, 4m wide, and 1m deep. Commissioned in 1880 to stand at the planned Decorative Arts Museum, which was never built, it was planned to take five years, but Rodin spent the next 37 years until his death, working on it.

The work consists of 180 figures, the most prominent of them, ‘The Thinker’, also called ‘The Poet’. Who it is has been the subject of much debate, with Dante, the biblical Adam, or even Rodin himself, being the favoured choices. The scene in which this figure resides is but a fraction of the whole piece. Most of the figures on the whole piece are Rodin’s interpretations of the original characters, rather than Dante’s. Many of the figures conceived for the piece were cast as separate sculptures, and are more widely known in those forms.

As part of Coins Today’s stackable range, the design on the front, struck in high-relief, is formed into the back in negative form, allowing multiple copies to be stacked together. We’ve been constantly amazed at some of the designs in this range, extraordinary in the way the base concept has been realised. This one reproduces the complex top frieze from The Gates of Hell in two ounces of silver.

It’s a fine reproduction given the limitations of the medium. The source sculpture is around a metre in depth, and exhibits a considerable sense of depth as a result. CT have done a good job considering, but it isn’t our favourite of the range. The choice of source material was perhaps a little too ambitious to be reproduced in detail, but as we said, a fine effort, and one that captures the essence of Rodin’s vision. Each two-ounce piece comes encapsulated, and it has a mintage of 15,000 units. Expect it to be available any time now.