Janus He appears selfless and compassionate but, in truth, is power-hungry, amoral, and without regard for the well-being of others. In the 1987 thriller novel "The Janus Man" by British novelist Raymond Harold Sawkins, Janus is used as a metaphor for a Soviet agent infiltrated into British Secret Intelligence Service - "The Janus Man who faces both East and West". Janus In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus (; ("Iānus"), ) is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and endings. He is usually depicted as having two faces, since he looks to the future and to the
The Gates of Hell The Hôtel Biron became the Musée Rodin housing a cast of "The Gates of Hell" and related works. Rodin conceived that people would walk toward the work, perhaps up a flight of stairs, and be overwhelmed frontally by the massive gates, contemplating the experience of hell that Dante describes in his "Inferno". Rodin thought particularly of Dante's warning over the entrance of the Inferno, "Abandon every hope, who enter here." A work of the scope of "The Gates of Hell" had not been attempted before, but inspiration came from Lorenzo Ghiberti's "Gates of Paradise" at the Baptistery of St. John,