Ugolino and His Sons Starving to Death in the Tower (1806): Artwork and History

Ugolino and His Sons Starving to Death in the Tower (1806) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Henry Fuseli Swiss, active in England, 1741-1825.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

Count Ugolino della Gherardesca was a medieval Italian nobleman of Pisa accused of treason and locked in a tower with his sons and grandsons to starve to death. He was made famous as one of the damned souls in Dante’s poem the Inferno. Dante leaves unclear the ghoulish question of whether or not Ugolino ate his offspring’s corpses, which would have appealed to Fuseli’s dark imagination. In a drawing of exquisite refinement and sensitivity, Fuseli uses his media (pen, wash, and graphite) to great effect, capturing the despair bordering on madness expressed by Ugolino’s stoic figure and demeanor.

Object facts

• Title: Ugolino and His Sons Starving to Death in the Tower
• Date: 1806
• Artist attribution: Henry Fuseli Swiss, active in England, 1741-1825
• Place of origin: England
• Medium: Pen and black ink and brush and black, gray, and red wash, over traces of graphite, on grayish-ivory laid paper
• Dimensions: 63.9 × 52.2 cm (25 3/16 × 20 9/16 in.)
• Type: Drawing and Watercolor
• Department: Prints and Drawings
• Reference number: 1922.5682

Collection credit

The Leonora Hall Gurley Memorial Collection

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.