Yet Dante himself shares Ugolino's vengefulness, concluding the tale with an invocation to the river Arno to flood shameful Pisa. Distinguishing features: In 18th- and 19th-century art, Ugolino is a man oppressed by power, like the prisoners in the Bastille; he is noble, tragic, utterly empathetic in his suffering.
In Carpeaux's sculpture, he is a Romantic hero. His chin rests in his hand in melancholic thought, like the figure of Lorenzo de'Medici on his tomb by Michelangelo, but he is gnawing on his fingers, surrounded by the dying boys whose suffering drives him to distraction. Carpeaux has illustrated the moment when the boys see Ugolino chew his hands in rage and believe it is from hunger, the moment when they plead that he eat them - the moment when they put this fatal possibility in his mind.
This is also a study in the tense depiction of an intertwined group. Carpeaux began it at the traditional training ground of French artists, the Villa Medici in Rome. As well as the Medici tombs, Ugolino's pose imitates one of the damned in Michelangelo's Last Judgment, not to mention the definitive image of the sublime in classical sculpture, the Laocoon group in the Vatican.
Inspirations and influences: William Blake and Joshua Reynolds made Ugolino an icon of humanity born free but everywhere in chains. Aligning himself with Guelphs and Ghibellines alike, he switched allegiances often until his ultimate imprisonment and death by starvation. Ugolino della Gherardesca, Count of Donoratico, was a great but treacherous Italian nobleman and politician. He was a member of the Ghibellines, the rival political faction to the Guelphs Dante's own faction.
Always pitting one man against another as blood spilled, he thought about no one other than himself, hoping to protect his own power. Ugolino betrayed the Ghibellines and his own birthplace of Pisa multiple times to the Guelphs, yet always managed to wriggle out of penalties and regain his influence over the city. He negotiated with Archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini in order to establish himself as overlord of Pisa instead of his nephew, Nino Visconti.
The mark of Hell is that the sinners retain those earthly qualities that condemned them. Francesca loved Paolo at first sight, loves him now, and will never cease to love him.
Likewise, Ugolino hated Ruggieri in life, viciously hates him now, and no amount of hate and suffering will ever satisfy his desire for more and more hate. Dante's genius is further seen in the fact that while Ugolino is in Hell for being a traitor, he is, instead, presented not as a traitor but as one who has been betrayed. The horror of his action is mitigated by the sufferings of a father. This is the law of retaliation: Ruggieri becomes the savage feast for the man who died of starvation along with his four sons.
The horrifying image of Ugolino's savage repast is always before us — from the moment that Ugolino lifts his head from the "skull and other parts of the brain" and cleans his mouth by wiping off the "brain" matter, using his neighbor's hair as a napkin.
He, then, recites his tender narration of the horror of watching his four sons die one by one of starvation. Thus Ugolino hates violently because he loved his sons so intensely.
His hatred is so great because his love was infinite, and his grief is so desperate because nothing can assuage him. As he finishes his story, he returns immediately to the gnawing of the brains and the crackling of the bones beneath him. Both Francesca and Ugolino recollect the past with the same words, they both express their grief, and they both answer Dante's inquiries about their fate, but one emphasizes the controlling beauty of love, while the other dwells on the savage emotions of rage and hatred.
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