Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Ugolino and His Sons is a horror story to trump all other horror stories. 

The largest figure with the twisted, angry face is Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, a real life Italian nobleman who is immortalized in Dante's Inferno. Dante puts Ugolino in the second ring of the lowest level of hell, which is reserved for traitors. This is apt, as before his banishment into the depths of hell, Ugolino enjoyed the life of a corrupt politician in Pisa, Italy.

Exiled from the city for suspicion of treason, Ugolino plotted with neighboring opposing forces to attack Pisa and reestablish his power.  As king pin of Pisa, he became paranoid of other politicians, including his own nephew, destroying their palaces and ejecting them from the city (which seemed to be the go-to move around those parts in the Late Middle Ages). As Ugolino acted increasingly uncooperatively with the neighboring Genoa, a food shortage sparked riots amongst the townspeople and the opposition took their shot, violently overthrowing Ugolino. He was imprisoned for his dirty deeds along with his sons and grandsons, left in a tower to starve to death or resort to cannibalism after the keys were apparently thrown into the Arno river by his rival, the Archbishop.

It's in Dante's portrayal of Ugolino and his sons that Carpeaux finds his subject for this sculpture, painting a picture of grotesque suffering and despair. Dante describes Ugolino and the Archbishop trapped in ice up to their necks, with Ugolino gnawing at his enemy's skull. Though Carpeaux foregoes the head biting, the scene is still a major step away from the classical and Biblical figures students usually submitted to the French Academy in Rome, where Carpeaux studied. Some tried to deter him away from Count Ugolino and towards a more appropriate subject, but Carpeaux insisted that, “My mind always returns to my Ugolino.” Carpeaux looked to the Vatican’s famous Greek sculpture of Laocoon and His Sons for inspiration, and prepped with many sketches of malnourished kids to achieve the accuracy of starving bodies. (Oddly enough, one curator at the Met supposedly positioned this statue of Count Ugolino at the entrance to the snack bar, which is either very hilarious or wildly insensitive depending on your POV.)

Carpeaux isn’t the only artist transfixed by Dante's description of Ugolino's demise; Auguste Rodin, William Blake, Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Doré, and Joshua Reynolds have all depicted the man in his madness.