Rodin sculpture liberated on Bastille Day

They were ordinary merchants in the French port of Calais when the English army laid siege in the 14th century, but they became national heroes when they offered themselves as human sacrifices to save their city. In the end, King Edward III was so moved by the gesture that he released the captives and spared the town.

The Burghers of Calais, as immortalized in Auguste Rodin's heart-rending eponymous sculpture, were liberated a second time Thursday - fittingly, Bastille Day - when Philadelphia officials formally dedicated their new home in the refurbished Rodin Museum gardens. Fifty-six years after being locked up in a cramped gallery inside the jewel-box museum, the group of bronze figures is back outside, in an intimate garden nook, where it was meant to be.

Their return to their rightful spot on the east side of the galleries is the first of several renovation projects to freshen up the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in preparation for next summer's debut of its newest resident, the Barnes Foundation. Altogether, the city is spending $20.9 million on landscape and road improvements between Logan Square and 23d Street, much of the funding donated by foundations.

Philadelphia has long had a crush on all things French, and the $5.3 million refurbishment of the Rodin Museum reinforces the amour.

The museum was designed in the late 1920s by a transplanted Frenchman, Paul Philippe Cret, and landscaped by another, Jacques Gréber, to house a collection of works by France's greatest sculptor. (The actual collector, Jules Mastbaum, was a Philadelphia movie theater operator.) The sculpture gallery, which may be the city's most flawlessly elegant building, sits midway along the Parkway, which is, of course, modeled on Paris' Champs-Élysées boulevard.

The Rodin Museum is also located next to the Barnes' new building, which is rapidly nearing completion. Its architects are not French, but its gardens are being designed by Olin, the same Philadelphia firm that renovated the landscape at the Rodin.

The goal, said Olin's Susan K. Weiler, is to restore the cohesiveness of the Parkway, which was laid out by Gréber. He envisioned the boulevard as a single landscape punctuated by a series of classical structures. Over time, as plantings grew wild and the Parkway was altered to accommodate the car, some of that unity was lost.