AFTER JEAN-BAPTISTE CARPEAUX | UGOLINO AND HIS SONS

Cyril Humphris, London

Arthur M. Sackler

His sale, Sotheby's New York, January 29, 2010, lot 533

The present bronze is one of the most celebrated compositions by Carpeaux, Ugolino and his sons. The sculptor first conceived of the idea of a sculpture depicting Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, a character from Dante's Divine Comedy, as a fourth year student project during his time at the French Academy in Rome located at the Villa Medici. 

This bronze is based on a mold taken from a plaster model now in the Petit Palais, Paris, of similar dimensions and signed in the same manner 'JB Carpeaux Roma 1860' (PPS01572). The date 1860 refers to the year in which Carpeaux refined the composition and produced the first full-scale plaster which was shown at the Villa Medici in 1861 and then at the Paris Salon of 1862. 

Later bronze casts were made and in 1863 Carpeaux employed the foundry, Barbidienne, to make a model for a reduction of the group. The extraordinary monumental bronze cast is in the Musée d'Orsay and the equally impressive marble is in the Metropolitan Museum, New York.

RELATED LITERATURE

Metamorphoses in Nineteenth Century Sculpture, exhibition catalogue, The Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 1975, pp. 113-123;

Peter Fusco and H. W. Janson (eds.), The Romantics to Rodin : French nineteenth-century sculpture from North American collections, New York, 1980, nos. 30-32, pp.146-148