Ugolino and His Sons
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827 to 1875) · About 1862
A gaunt old man sits hunched with his fingers pressed against his teeth, staring into nothing, while four boys cling to his legs and body. One presses his face against his father's knee, another has collapsed at his feet, the smallest has already died. This is Count Ugolino della Gherardesca as Dante describes him in the thirty third canto of the Inferno: locked in a tower in Pisa with his sons and grandsons and left to starve, he is offered his own flesh by the children and, in the poem's terrible last line on the subject, fasting proves stronger than grief. Carpeaux leaves the question of what happened next hanging in the air.
The group was Carpeaux's final project as a student at the French Academy in Rome, and it broke the rules. Envoi sculptures were supposed to be single figures on noble themes; he delivered a pyramid of five twisting bodies on a subject of horror. Look at the anatomy, which is as intense as Michelangelo's, and at the way the composition spirals upward from the dead child to the father's clenched hands. Walk around it: every angle gives a different arrangement of limbs. The surface of this plaster keeps the marks of the sculptor's tools, which the finished bronze at the Musée d'Orsay smooths away.
This plaster is one of the working versions of the group that came to the Petit Palais with the large donations from Carpeaux's family, which made the museum one of the two main centres for his work along with Valenciennes, his home town. Ugolino was shown at the Salon of 1863 and made Carpeaux famous almost overnight. Notice the chain and shackle by the foot of the dead child, the only props in the whole composition.
Did You Know? The Academy in Rome tried to reject Ugolino because a student's final work was supposed to be a single figure, and Carpeaux had delivered five.
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