The Kiss shows a nude couple in a passionate embrace,
initiating their first kiss. Inspired by the star-crossed,
thirteenth-century lovers Paolo and Francesca from
Dante’s epic poem The Divine Comedy, Rodin originally
modeled this pair for The Gates of Hell before developing
it as an independent group. Today the composition is
one of Rodin’s most beloved and reproduced, but the
nudity of its protagonists, with scant literary or mythological pretext, shocked many viewers well into the
twentieth century