Sculpture is often used as a medium to immortalize important people and stories. Throughout the ages, popular subject matter has included mythological scenes, political leaders, and religious figures. However, one of the most prominent individual themes in classical sculpture does not fit into any of these grand categories. The image of the “Spinario,” also known as the “Thorn-Puller,” shows a seated nude boy concentrating intensely on removing a thorn from his foot. This premise has profoundly inspired artists for thousands of years.
Earliest Surviving Spinario
The most famous version of the “Spinario” is the celebrated bronze statue at Rome’s Capitoline Museums. This masterpiece is seemingly the original, though there may be earlier examples that have not survived or remain undiscovered. While some scholars cite its creation as the third century B.C., its home institution asserts that it probably dates to the first century B.C.
Stylistically, it features traits from multiple periods, with the boy’s body drawing from Hellenistic influences from the third to second century B.C., and the boy’s head modeled from Greek art of the fifth century B.C. The boy’s gaze is focused on tending to his injury, as a thorn is stuck in his sole. There is a lyricism to his delicate features that are contrasted by tensed muscles.
Unique Attributes
The Capitoline Museums’ “Spinario,” along with its subject matter, is unique in multiple ways. It is rare for a large-scale bronze from antiquity to survive, and unlike most sculptures from the Hellenistic and Roman eras that can be identified with a specific story, it is not associated with a definitive narrative.There are a number of interpretations about the boy’s pose. Historic readings have included identifying the “Spinario” as a faithful shepherd boy who is stopped in his tracks by a thorn while on his way to deliver a communication to the Roman Senate. During the Roman Empire, the “Spinario” was said to portray Ascanius, a legendary Trojan prince considered an ancestor of Julius Caesar. Today, some specialists believe it shows simply a boy removing a thorn that lodged in his foot when he stomped on grapes during the harvest season.
Antico’s Spinario
A Renaissance version of the “Spinario” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a small treasure. Created by the sculptor-goldsmith Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi, known as Antico (circa 1460–1528), it is considered the best surviving example of his iterations of the “Spinario.” It may have been made for the illustrious arts patroness Isabella d’Este, who married into the Gonzaga family who ruled Mantua. Antico was their court sculptor. The artist was famous for his reworkings of large ancient statues into precious bronze statuettes.
The composition of The Met’s “Spinario” (“Boy Pulling a Thorn From His Foot”) is modeled after the Capitoline bronze, but it has subtle nuances. It is a beautiful and idealized work in its own right that is also animated and lifelike.
Antico shows the boy pulling a thorn from his heel, instead of his sole. The raised foot has curled toes that anticipate physical pain while the other foot balances on the ground, barely touching it. His smooth body, which is not angular like the Capitoline bronze, is contrasted by the rough tree trunk he uses as a seat. The boy’s curly hair is gilded and his eyes are silvered.
In the catalogue “Italian Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” curator Denise Allen wrote, “The curved silhouette of the boy’s back is reiterated by the deep arch of the spine and echoed by the undulating profile of the rocky base on which he is seated. The exquisite syncopation between line and form closes in the graceful orchestration of gesture, gaze, and pose centered on the boy’s fingers as they delicately hover over the point of the thorn embedded in his heel.”
This work was designed to be seen from below, so it would have been placed on a shelf above eye level. Due to its compact size, it also was intended to be held in the hand for closer contemplation.
The “Spinario” continued to exert a strong influence on culture throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Visitors paid homage to the bronze in Rome as part of the Grand Tour. Copies continued to be widely circulated and the theme found its way into drawings and paintings.
An example of the latter is “Vanitas Still Life With Spinario,” a complex oil painting by the distinguished Dutch still-life artist Pieter Claesz (1596/97–1660). This Rijksmuseum work reveals an arrangement of items alluding to the arts and sciences, smoothly and finely depicted, which would have been used as models by an educated artist like Claesz. Among the armor, books, drawings, musical instruments, paintbrush, and palette, one’s eye goes to the large plaster cast of the “Spinario” that was likely after the Capitoline bronze.
Former Rijksmuseum curator Jan Piet Filedt Kok wrote, “Such casts and copies were also frequently used as drawing models in northern studios, and it seems to have been regarded as an ideal specimen of classical art for 16th- and 17th-century artists.”
The “Spinario” was an artwork of such symbolism that Napoleon coveted it. In 1798, the Capitoline’s bronze was triumphantly paraded through the streets of Paris along with other art masterpieces plundered by Napoleon. After the emperor’s defeat, the “Spinario” was returned to Rome, where it remains. Wherever one sees a cast of the “Spinario,” all roads lead to Rome.
