BRUNSWICK – Thursday, Jan. 29, the Bowdoin College Museum will open an exhibition of 13 bronze sculptures by Auguste Rodin, the most famous and controversial sculptor of the 19th century.

On loan from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation, these masterworks are related directly or indirectly to Rodin’s greatest project, “The Gates of Hell.”

Born Francois-Auguste-René Rodin, the French sculptor, who lived from 1840 to 1917, shared many of the aspirations that drove Michelangelo. But he also shared one of the Florentine’s failures. Just as Michelangelo never realized his most ambitious sculptural project – the huge and complex tomb of Pope Julius II – Rodin never saw the final casting of his magnum opus, “The Gates of Hell.”

Commissioned in 1880 by a committee of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and inspired by Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” “The Gates” would have represented the entrance to the Inferno (the French title of “The Gates” is “La Porte de l’Enfer”). After years of preliminary studies, Rodin finally produced a full-scale, plaster version of “The Gates” in 1886, although it would go through many changes during the next decade and would not be cast in bronze in Rodin’s lifetime.

Although the project was never really completed, Rodin cast several of its 150 figures as individual sculptures, including “The Kiss,” “Adam,” the seated figure now known as “The Thinker,” and “The Three Shades,” the center piece of the “Rodin – The Knowledge of a Thousand Gestures” exhibition open for viewing through Aug. 3.

Here, and in most of the figures “borrowed” from “The Gates,” Rodin explored both the physical and emotional nature of his subjects, creating in three dimensions the spiritual descendants of Michelangelo’s nudes of the Sistine Ceiling.

His later sculptures are often described as a sculptor’s response to Impressionism, and with some reason, given Rodin’s interest in the furtive reflections of light on a moving surface. But like Michelangelo’s nudes, Rodin’s figures combine poses and gestures that speak to the mind as well as to the eye.

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art is open to the public free of charge, although donations are welcome.

Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Thursday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Closed on Monday and national holidays. The museum is wheelchair accessible through the new Pavilion entrance.

The “Rodin – The Knowledge of a Thousand Gestures” exhibition is in the museum’s rotunda.