Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux

The model is one of Carpeaux's most celebrated compositions, conceived in Rome in 1857, whilst the sculptor was a student at the Villa Medici. Derived from canto XXXIII of Dante's Inferno, the group shows the imprisoned Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, his sons and grandsons starving to death. Carpeaux's masterpiece is a testament to his near worship of Michelangelo, whilst also referencing the famous Laocoön in the Cortile del Belvedere of the Vatican. A life-size marble version is famously in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. no. 67.250).

Poletti and Richarme note that the sketch was neither edited by the artist in his lifetime nor his descendants, but was finally edited in bronze in 1935 by the Susse foundry. The present plaster is one of a number which appear to derive from moulds taken of the original plaster in the Villa Medici. These casts have been categorised by Annie Braunwald and Anne Middleton Wagner, with the present plaster according most closely with their 'type C' of which a cast is in the Detroit Institute of Art and is numbered 5. As in the present plaster, the 'type C' casts lack mould lines. It is interesting to note that the present cast is numbered 9, which may indicate that it could have been cast in the same run as the Detroit plaster. Poletti and Richarme note that casts were probably made for admiring students at the Villa Medici. The nature and extent of the pre-Susse plaster and bronze casts is unknown. It seems likely that may of the plasters were cast in Rome in the 19th century and later.

RELATED LITERATURE
A. Braunwald and A. Wagner, 'Jean-Baptiste Carpeux (1827-1875)', in J. L. Wasserman, ed., Metamorphoses in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture, exh. cat. Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 1975, pp. 109-123; M. Poletti and Richarme, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux sculpteur. Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre édité, Paris, 2003, pp. 170-171, no. ES 16