Harvard Art Museums is the umbrella institution for three collections: the Fogg Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum. Although these museums once had separate histories and locations, they are now housed together in the same building at 32 Quincy Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That is why a work can be described both as being in the Harvard Art Museums and in the Fogg Museum collection at the same time.

Rodin’s The Eternal Idol is one of his most sensual and mysterious sculptures and was used for inspiration for the Black Sabbath album The Eternal Idol. The best-known marble version, now at Harvard, dates from 1893 and measures 72.4 × 63.5 × 40 cm. It shows a kneeling young man leaning toward a woman who seems both physically present and strangely distant, almost as if she is less a real person than an idealized vision. Harvard’s own gallery text notes that the title is puzzling, and suggests that the woman may be understood as an “idol” in the poetic nineteenth-century sense: an adored, almost worshipped figure. The work also grew out of Rodin’s larger Gates of Hell project, which gives it an added tension between desire, devotion, ecstasy, and spiritual unease. Rather than simply showing a romantic embrace, the sculpture feels suspended between love and reverence, flesh and fantasy, heaven and hell.

The sculpture became part of Black Sabbath history when the band planned to use a photograph of Rodin’s The Eternal Idol for the cover of their 1987 album of the same name. According to accounts based on Tony Iommi’s autobiography, permission to use the original sculpture image could not be secured, so the band recreated the pose with two live models painted in bronze tones. The result was visually striking, but the shoot reportedly went badly: the paint used on the models was toxic enough that both of them had to be hospitalized afterwards.

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