If only more public artworks could be like The Burghers of Calais, a powerful monument to everyday heroes

It’s great to be able to celebrate a genuinely powerful and moving public sculpture. There have been so many disappointments, and that’s a gentle way to describe the ugly, stupid stuff our cities have become cluttered with since public art became a British obsession of the noughties. The recession has slowed it down a bit – I haven’t heard as much about it lately, anyway – but the torrent has not ceased: we still have Yinka Shonibare’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle to look forward to.

But this is not the work I wish to praise. No, I want to take a moment to point out Britain’s most poignant and beautiful work of modern art in a public place. It is Rodin’s sculpture The Burghers of Calais and it stands in the gardens west of the Houses of Parliament. Have you stood and looked up at this tender masterpiece recently, its dark figures framed against the gothic honeycomb of Westminster?

Perhaps only tourists see it, but actually you can walk here in a few moments from Tate Britain. It’s worth the stroll. The medievalism of the architecture that looms over it sets the scene nicely: when Calais was besieged by the English king in the 14th century, six townsmen gave themselves over as prisoners, believing they were to be executed in return for the city’s salvation. In the event, they were spared, but Rodin’s sculpture portrays the moment of their martyr-like sacrifice: it is a poem to surrender. The emaciated bodies, tattered robes and, above all, the wonderfully delicate and melancholy gestures and poses of the figures express a strange and captivating mood of self-negation.

With this sculpture, designed in the 1880s, Rodin proved himself the greatest European sculptor since Michelangelo and Bernini. Indeed, the soft feeling of surrender it evokes is comparable with Michelangelo’s Dying Slave in the Louvre. Yet, in Rodin’s hands, this is disconcertingly modern art.

Rodin’s masterpiece is sculpture as history painting, and it serves in London as a monument to humble, everyday heroes. It is true and it is beautiful. If only more public art rose to its level.

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