Dante and Virgil in Hell

This is a strange painting to find in Bouguereau's catalogue. He built his career on smooth, idealized nudes and gentle mythology, but here, in 1850, he painted two damned men tearing at each other. He was 25 and trying to win the Prix de Rome, the prize that sent young French painters to Italy, and he chose a brutal scene from Dante's Inferno to prove his range. The two figures come from the circle of the falsifiers. The man sinking his teeth into the other's neck is Gianni Schicchi, who once faked a dead man's will to steal an inheritance. Dante and his guide Virgil watch from the shadows, and a winged demon grins above the fight. Bouguereau lost the prize that year all the same.