Ugolino and His Sons (Dante's Inferno)

Dual camera scan at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC. The top of the sculpture is over 10 feet off the ground, so it was a real challenge to get all the angles without breaking the museum rules. Maybe some day we'll get permission to bring a ladder? The sculptor was Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (French, Valenciennes 1827–1875 Courbevoie). Here's a description from the museum:* The subject of this intensely Romantic work is derived from canto XXXIII of Dante's Inferno, which describes how the Pisan traitor Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, his sons, and his grandsons were imprisoned in 1288 and died of starvation. Carpeaux's visionary statue, executed in 1865–67, reflects the artist's passionate reverence for Michelangelo, specifically for The Last Judgment (1536–41) in the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican, Rome, as well as his own painstaking concern with anatomical realism.* Fun fact: according to the Met's webpage, the scupture weighs 4955 lb. / 2247.6 kg.