L'Ombre, taille originale dite taille de la Porte

No work more directly expresses Rodin's intense admiration for Michelangelo than L’Ombre. The contorted, almost violent pose, bold musculature and the idealized facial type all are products of close study of the Italian sculptor. During his stay Italy in 1875, five years before modeling the present sculpture, Rodin wrote, "I have been studying Michelangelo since my first hour in Florence and I think that the great magician is revealing some of his secrets to me...I have made sketches at home in the evening, not after his works, but after all the scaffoldings, the methods I have invented to understand him; I think I have succeeded in giving to them some of that nameless quality that only he knows how to give" (quoted in J.L. Tancock, op. cit., p. 122). In modeling the present work, Rodin was particularly inspired by Michelangelo's unfinished marble sculptures of the Apostles (Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence) and by his Victory (Palazzo della Signoria, Florence).
Between 1881 and 1886, Rodin placed three casts of L’Ombre in a semicircle arrangement, crowning the top of his masterpiece The Gates of Hell. The original figure is closely related to Rodin’s interpretation of Adam conceived in 1881 whose forms mirror each other with a few small adjustments in posture. The three sullen figures represent the damned souls of Dante's deceased countrymen. When first exhibited atop the pediment, the figures faced towards a plaque featuring the inscription "Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'intrate" (abandon all hope, you who enter here), the same inscription appearing over the entrance to Hell in Dante's Inferno.