NARRATOR—The Age of Bronze is Rodin's earliest surviving life-size sculpture. The original plaster cast was exhibited at the Salon of 1877, where its extreme anatomical exactitude elicited much attention. Several critics and officials accused Rodin of having made the work from a series of molds taken directly from the model's body. Once these rumors were dispelled, the French government purchased the plaster cast for 2,000 francs, thereby establishing Rodin's reputation as a singularly talented—if always controversial—sculptor.

Typically for Rodin, there are no props or attributes to help us decipher the work's meaning. The significance of the sculpture is wholly dependent upon the artist's expressive manipulation of the nude human form. But it was not always like this. The sculpture was originally called The Conquered Man; the figure wore a fillet in his hair and supported the tip of a spear in his still- upraised left hand. The work was almost certainly intended to function as a memorial to France's defeat in the recent Franco-Prussian War. But Rodin ultimately rejected this politicized iconography in favor of a more general meaning. The final title, Age of Bronze, refers to a mythic race, in Rodin's own words, "physically perfect, but in the infancy of comprehension and beginning to awake to the world's meaning."