Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 29.djvu/345

 THE ROYAL ARCHAEOLOOICAL INSTITUTE. 289 touching and forcible delineation of that fearful history which plastic art has bequeathed to us, upon which he sent tiie following Notes. " In poetry the pen of the great Aligliieri has placed the liorrid scene before our minds in words which never can be efpialled ; the last few lines of the thirty-second and the first half of the thirty-third canto of the Inferno being devoted to that narrative. In the former Ugolino is found gnawing . . ' Even as bread through hunger is devoured ' the nape and sknll of his betrayer, the Archbishop Ruggero, and in the latter he describes the agonies of his and his children's famine. " The souljituro 1 refer to is a work in relievo, modelled in terra cotta by the hand of Tierino da Vinci, the nephew of the great Leonardo. This able sculptor, after studying in the school of II Tribolo, became, as some liave believed, a pupil of Michel Angelo, or, at least, ;i follower of his school, and attained an excellence of maimer perhaps nearer in nentiment and in character of design to that of the great master than any other follower whose works are known to us. So much was this the case, that the bas-relief in question, and other sculptures by Pierino, had for centuries been regarded as jtroductions of the great Michel. It is pro- bable that two or more rtpliats of the terra cotta I allude to were executed by Pierino, and by some mistake it has been supposed that the work was cast in bronze for the Chcrardesca family. This in all likeli- hood arose from the statement in A'^asari's biography, in which he says that a bas-relief of that subject was modelled by Pierino iu wax, after- wards to be cast iu bronze ; and again, he says that on the completion of the model it was so cast. It is, however, well known that Vasari is occasionally somewhat inaccurate. " I was fortunate enough several years since to purchase at Florence one of these replicas, which had been hanging for many years pi'eviously in a house not far off from that inhabited by ^Michel Angelo iu the Via tJhibellina, and had alwaj-s been supposed a work by that master. Happening, however, to know the composition from casts, taken as I had supposed from the bronze in the (Jherai-dcsca Palace, and feeling satisfied that the terra cotta was a work of that period, I thought that possibly it might be the original model from which the bronze wa.s cast. On making the acquaintance of Count Welfreddo della Gherardesca, I learnt that the bronze was more than ai)ocr3-i)hal, and had never existed ; that the work executed by Pierino for the Gherardesca was in terra cotta, and actually in the possession of Count Welfreddo, it never having left the family ; but that it was believed by them that more than one replica was actually executed at the time for other members of the family, descended from the ill-fated Ugolino. Count Welfreddo examined my terra cotta, kindly showing me his, and the conclusion we amved at, after a careful scrutiny, was that they were by the same hand, and of the same period ; in fiict, replicas by Piero's stecco. Ho courteously gave me a photograph taken from his bas-relief in exchange for one from mine, and also pre- sented nic with a copy of the work by Antonio Zobi — ' Con^iJerazioni storico-critiche suUa catastrofe di Ugolino Gherardesca,' 4 to, Firenze, 1840. " 1 now have the plciisure of exhibiting a photograph taken from my bas-relief, in artistic illustration of the fearful history of which the keys were the supposed instruments. The bas-relief represents a group, con- sisting of Ugoliuo, whose mental gaze of agony, his eyes being already