When I stood before Rodin’s Adam at the Art Institute of Chicago, I felt as though I was confronting something far greater than a sculpture. I’ve seen Rodin’s The Thinker and other celebrated works, but this piece struck me differently. Its power lies in its intentional conversation with Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and the universality it evokes. In this Adam, I didn’t see just the first man—I saw every man, every person grappling with the tension between divinity and rejection, labor and longing, creation and fall.
Rodin’s Adam directly echoes Michelangelo’s masterpiece through the pose of his hand. Yet here, the gesture is inverted. Where Michelangelo’s God reaches out with vitality and hope, Rodin’s Adam points downward, his hand heavy and lifeless. It is not the gesture of a man yearning for divine connection but of one who no longer believes he can reach it. This struck me profoundly—the arrogance of Michelangelo’s Adam, who refused to reach back to God, has dissolved into the resignation of Rodin’s Adam. Twisted and broken, this Adam knows God’s wrath. He is not the youthful, idyllic Adam of Eden, but a man aged by toil, estranged from the divine, and burdened by the consequences of his fall.
Rodin’s choice to depict Adam as an older man resonated with me deeply. His muscular yet weary body tells the story of life after the fall. This is not the Adam of creation but the Adam of exile. He is middle-aged, bent by the weight of a lifetime of labor and struggle. I saw in him a man who has worked the earth, wrestled with family, and carried the profound exhaustion of living. I felt that exhaustion too. In his downturned gaze and heavy hand, I saw the universal human experience of striving for connection while bearing the burden of rejection.
What makes Rodin’s Adam so powerful is its ability to place the viewer within that universal narrative. Standing before the sculpture, I felt like Adam—not just a man broken by rejection, but a man still striving, even if only in spirit. The downward-pointing hand, as much as it symbolizes resignation, also points to the earth, reminding us of humanity’s connection to the soil from which we were formed. It acknowledges our labor and our fallenness, but it also suggests renewal. For Adam’s hand, though heavy, is still strong; his body, though twisted, is still powerful. There is hope even in his toil.
Rodin’s Adam exists not in isolation but as part of a larger artistic and literary conversation. In Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, we see the spark of divine potential, the perfect moment of creation. Rodin’s Adam, by contrast, embodies the aftermath: the fractured connection between humanity and the divine. Similarly, in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam wrestles with the weight of his choices and the consequences of his fall. Rodin’s Adam externalizes this struggle, capturing the emotional and physical toll of existence after Eden.
Even in works like Edvard Munch’s The Scream, we find echoes of Rodin’s Adam. Where Munch’s figure cries out in existential despair, Rodin’s Adam internalizes that anguish. Both works confront the alienation and striving that define the human condition, making their figures deeply relatable. This universality is what makes Rodin’s Adam so timeless. It transcends its Biblical origin to speak to anyone who has ever felt the tension between who they are and who they might have been.
In this way, Adam is not just a figure of rejection and toil but a conduit for understanding our shared humanity. His fall is our fall, his labor our labor. Rodin’s sculpture reminded me that even in our brokenness, there is divinity; even in our toil, there is purpose. Adam’s story is not one of despair but of resilience. He is a man who, though cast out, continues to strive, and through his striving, connects us all to the universal story of what it means to be human.