page_title: Ugolino della Gherardesca
section_title: Ugolino and his children
hierarchical_section_title: Ugolino della Gherardesca / Literary afterlife / Ugolino and his children
context_page_description: Ugolino della Gherardesca, Count of Donoratico, was an Italian nobleman, politician and naval commander. He was frequently accused of treason and features prominently in Dante's Divine Comedy.
context_section_description: According to Dante, the prisoners were slowly starved to death and before dying Ugolino's children begged him to eat their bodies.
  Ugolino's statement that hunger proved stronger than grief has been interpreted in two ways, either that Ugolino devoured his offspring's corpses after being driven mad with hunger, or that starvation killed him after he had failed to die of grief. The first and more ghastly of these interpretations has proved the more popular and resonant. For this reason Ugolino is known as the "Cannibal Count" and is often depicted gnawing at his own fingers ("eating of his own flesh") in consternation, as in the sculpture The Gates of Hell by Auguste Rodin, in Ugolino and his Sons by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and in other artwork, though this may also simply refer to Ugolino's own statement in the poem that he gnawed his fingers in grief.
caption: Ugolino and his sons in their cell, as painted by William Blake circa 1826.
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