This week’s featured model is the famous sculpture group ‘Ugolino and his Sons’ by the French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. The sculpture, standing at just under two metres, epitomises the Romantic preoccupation with extreme physical and emotional states. The subject is taken from Dante’s Inferno, in which a suspected traitor, Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, is condemned to die imprisoned in a tower with his sons and grandsons.
Carpeaux depicted the moment at which the count, yielding to hunger and despair, contemplates cannibalism. Ugolino looks into the distance, the style reflecting the Vatican’s Laocoon and His Sons. His posture ignores the four children that cling to his body as if he were unaware they were there — the youngest is curled at his feet and possibly dead.