Ugolino and His Sons Starving to Death in the Tower

Prints and Drawings

1806

Henry Fuseli
Swiss, active in England, 1741-1825

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.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Prints and Drawings

Artist: Henry Fuseli
Title: Ugolino and His Sons Starving to Death in the Tower
Place: England (Artist's nationality:)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: 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.)
Credit Line: The Leonora Hall Gurley Memorial Collection
Reference Number: 1922.5682
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Gert Schiff, Johann Heinrich Füssli, 1741-1825, 2 vols. (Berichthaus Zurich, 1973), I: p. 639, II: pl. 1799a.
Gert Schiff and Paola Viotto, L’opera completa di Füssli (Rizzoli, 1977), pp. 102-03, under no. 224 (ill.).

London, The Tate Gallery, “Henry Fuseli,” Feb. 19-Mar. 31, 1975, p. 103 (ill.), cat. 121; traveled to Hamburg, Dec. 14 1974-Jan. 15, 1975, pp. 184-85, cat. 141 (ill.), and Paris, Petit Palais, Apr. 21-July 20, 1975, n.p., cat. 62 (ill.).
Los Angeles County Musem of Art, “Visions of Antiquity: Neoclassical Figure Drawings,” July 22-Sept. 19, 1993; also Philadelphia Museum of Art, Oct. 30, 1993-Jan. 2, 1994; and Minneapolis Institute of Art,Feb. 6-Apr. 3, 1994.
Art Institute of Chicago, “Shockingly Mad: Henry Fuseli and the Art of Drawing,” Nov. 16, 2017-Apr. 1, 2018, no cat.

Sold, Puttick & Simpson, London, Oct. 23, 1914, to William F. E. Gurley (1870-1943), Chicago; given to the Art Institute of Chicago for the Leonora Hall Gurley Memorial Collection, 1922.

Schiff 1799a

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