Ugolino and His Sons Starving to Death in the Tower
1806
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.)
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
7566
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
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 grea...
About the Artist
Henry Fuseli · 1741–1825
Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), born Johann Heinrich Füssli in Zürich, was a Swiss-British painter whose visionary works exploring dreams, nightmares, and psychological terror made him one of the most original figures of the Romantic movement. His art bridged Neoclassical discipline with Romantic emotionalism, creating images of supernatural intensity that would influence artists from William Blake to t...