French sculptor Auguste Rodin originally envisioned his iconic sculpture The Thinker as part of a larger sculptural group work depicting the Gates of Hell from Dante Alighieri’s epic poem Inferno, in which the author descends through the nine circles of hell. The Thinker, a representation of Dante himself, would have been placed atop the 19-foot-tall gates, his grave expression greeting those who dared to enter.

While Rodin failed to complete the gates before his death in 1917, he did finish The Thinker. Presented at the Salon des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1904, the bronze statue—of a muscular man seated on a pedestal, his brow furrowed and clenched fist digging into the lower half of his face—not only became one of the artist’s most recognizable artworks, but one of the most recognizable artworks in general, on par with Edvard Munch’s The Scream and Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

Such was the reception of The Thinker, known in French as Le Penseur, that there now exist numerous copies of the sculpture. Some were cast from the same mold as the original under the artist’s supervision. Others were made without his direct involvement, explaining small differences in design, like the positioning of the hand and fingers.

The Thinker has been reproduced in Legos, as car stickers, and—most recently—in memes. Representative of the act of thinking itself, the statue is regularly used to illustrate philosophical conundrums and other questions big and small, from whether natural talent is preferable to acquired skill to why on Earth anybody would ever use a semicolon when it’s functionally identical to a period.

In this regard, The Thinker is similar to the meme template “philosoraptor,” which trades the statue for an image of a pensive velociraptor.

Other memes poke fun at the statue’s dramatic appearance by associating it with something silly. Instead of pondering complicated logical problems or ethical dilemmas, many memes have The Thinker considering something as mundanely relatable as what to have for dinner. Others show the muscular man seated not on a pedestal but a toilet, accompanied by the text: “When you forget to bring your phone to the bathroom.”

To ask what makes The Thinker so “memeable” is to ask what makes it such a culturally ubiquitous artwork in the first place. A possible answer is that the statue does an exceptional job at visualizing an action that is largely invisible. “What makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips,” Rodin once said, “but with every muscle of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes.”

The memes also pick up on the humor present in Rodin’s self-serious creation—a humor some of its earliest critics took note of as well. “This was described as looking like a ‘wild orangutan,’” Lynda Hartigan, coordinating curator at the Peabody Essex Museum, said of an 1888 exhibition in Denmark. “That it was some sort of representation of brute force, or brute manhood, as opposed to something that represented thoughtfulness. And part of it has to do with the extreme definition of the muscles. Even now looking at it, as much as we might be in awe of it, it’s actually kind of in-your-face.”

What’s in a meme? Sometimes, art. Art Behind the Meme brings you the low-down on the artworks that have achieved our era’s finest and rarest feat: virality. Read on for how these art-historical works have been reimagined for the age of social media.