Pierino da Vinci: Ugolino and His Sons, c.1550

  • The Cleveland Museum of Art

  • A masterpiece of Italian Renaissance sculpture: an important relief representing Ugolino and His Sons by the Florentine sculptor Pierino da Vinci.

     

    This gifted artist, whose life tragically ended at the age of 23, was the nephew of Leonardo da Vinci, and a pupil of Baccio Bandinelli and Niccolò Tribolo. The present composition has been hailed as his masterpiece in recent scholarship.

     

    A powerfully modelled relief, it represents the story of Count Ugolino della Gherardesca’s imprisonment with his sons in a tower in the city of Pisa, as was famously narrated by Dante in the Divine Comedy. The work showcases several direct quotations of Michelangelo’s frescoes and sculptures in Rome, which Pierino could have inspected first-hand in 1548, two years before receiving the relief’s commission from his patron, Luca Martini. 

     
  • Pierino da vinci
    1530–1553
     
    Ugolino and His Sons

    Terracotta

    62.6 x 44.5 cm (excluding the frame)

    c. 1550

     
    PROVENANCE

    • Della Gherardesca collection, Florence

    • Antinori collection, Florence

    • Private collection, Switzerland

    • Alain Moatti, Paris, then sold in 2005 to

    • Private Collection, Switzerland

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