Ugolino and His Sons Starving to Death in the Tower

From the Art Institute of Chicago record

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.