Ugolino and His Sons

The imprisoned Count Ugolino crouches in torment, biting his own knuckles in despair as his starving sons and grandsons collapse against his legs, one already dying - the moment from Dante's Inferno when the condemned man is tempted to devour his own children to survive. Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux carves the knot of writhing, emaciated bodies with ferocious Baroque energy and anatomical drama. Now in the Metropolitan Museum, Ugolino and His Sons is among the most harrowing sculptures of the nineteenth century, a coiled monument of hunger, guilt, and unbearable paternal anguish wrung from cold marble.