This paper discusses the literary sources of Auguste Rodin’s Gates of Hell and in particular the artist’s highly personal interpretation of Dante’s Inferno. The Courtauld Gallery’s exhibition of Botticelli’s drawings after Dante’s Divine Comedy provides an ideal framework for presenting current research into Rodin’s use of Dante in the making of his monumental Gates of Hell. Rodin’s Gates are the subject of an exhibition at the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City, which will be opening at the Musée Rodin in Paris in October. Rodin’s earliest source of inspiration for the Gates of Hell was Dante, and several drawings can indeed be related to specific passages in the Divine Comedy. But as soon as he started working on the Gates, Rodin began taking liberties with Dante’s text, as at no point was he looking to illustrate it in any sense. Interestingly, his drawings often contain several annotations, not all of which relate to Dante. It will be argued that this multiplicity of possible meanings, a key to Rodin’s artistic practice in general, was present in even the earliest stages of his creative research for the Gates. Quite quickly, Rodin began combining Dante with other literary sources. This is especially the case with Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, which in the end became the dominant source of the Gates.