[…] This is not a preliminary study of the painting but close-up of the distorted physiognomy of the protagonist, a foreground well corresponding to what Saint-Maurice Cabany noted, describing, in the finished painting, Ugolino as “immobile, défiguré, décharné, aveuglé par la faim”, which Benvenuti rendered in this painting adopting a completely new style in both composition and in the sober color palette. From what can be deduced from the Belliard’s lithograph and, most of all, from the preparatory drawing at the Uffizi, the idea of Benvenuti was expressed in a dramatization of mostly classicist taste culminating in the coherent heroic reading with the choice to allude to a modern Laocoon; in this painting, instead, the essential frontality of the face makes a component of pathos strongly emerge with recalls, if anything, the character studies established in the theoretical and figurative investigations started in the Age of Enlightened to reach the “alienated” by Théodore Géricault.

Excerpt of the expertise by prof. Carlo Sisi in the catalogue of the exhibition “Fascination and elegance in Neoclassical Art”, 2022.