Ugolino and His Sons Starving to Death in the Tower

Henry Fuseli · 1806

Medium

Pen and black ink and brush and black, gray, and red wash, over traces of graphite, on grayish-ivory laid paper

Original size

63.9 × 52.2 cm (25 3/16 × 20 9/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Neoclassicism

Fuseli's depiction of Ugolino captures one of Dante's most harrowing scenes — the imprisoned count surrounded by his dying sons — with a rawness that feels closer to nightmare than narrative illustration. Henry Fuseli was a Swiss-born painter who became a central figure in British Romanticism, drawn repeatedly to the extremes of human suffering and the darker currents of literary imagination. Working here in ink and wash rather than oils, he builds the composition through shadow and gesture alone, stripping away any decorative distraction to leave only anguish. The figures press toward each other in the dimness, their forms barely held together by light — it is drama achieved through restraint, which is unusual for Fuseli. The Ugolino subject attracted several of Fuseli's contemporaries, including Joshua Reynolds, who painted a well-known version in 1773 — a measure of how powerfully Dante's account gripped the Romantic imagination. This hand-painted oil reproduction translates the original's intensity into a medium with greater warmth and physical presence, bringing Fuseli's stark tonal contrasts and expressive draftsmanship to life on canvas in a way that invites close, sustained attention.