Ugolino and his Children 1863 - 1865

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux created this bronze sculpture, Ugolino and his Children, in nineteenth-century France. Here we see a father contemplating a terrible decision. The sculpture depicts a scene from Dante’s Inferno in which Count Ugolino della Gherardesca is imprisoned with his sons and grandsons and faced with starvation. Carpeaux’s sculpture illustrates the complex relationship between art and the public. Commissioned for the École des Beaux-Arts, a French Academy dedicated to the arts, this sculpture was intended to instruct students on the dramatic possibilities of the human form. While the references to the classical and Renaissance styles are evident, the realism and raw emotion broke with academic tradition and shocked some contemporary viewers. The bronze hints at the tensions between artistic innovation and institutional expectations in nineteenth-century France. To understand such tensions, we can study archival material that documents the history of the École des Beaux-Arts as well as critical reviews published at the time.