The Spinario (‘Thorn-puller’)
Italian School
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
c. 1820 - 1850
Materials
Bronze
Measurements
209 x 114 mm; 146 mm (L)
Place of origin
Rome
Order this imageCollection
The Argory, County Armagh
NT 565224
Summary
Sculpture, bronze; the Spinario; Italian, probably Rome; c. 1820-1850. A small bronze reduction of a celebrated Roman bronze figure of a seated boy extracting a thorn from his foot, which was first recorded as early as the 1160s, and is today in the Capitoline Museums. Depicting a young boy extracting a thorn from his foot, the copy of a Hellenistic Greek original is one of only a handful of large-scale Roman bronze statues which survived intact in Rome into modern times.
Full description
A small bronze reproduction of the Roman bronze statue known as the Spinario or thorn-puller. An adolescent boy, naked and with carefully combed hair ending in small curls, is seated on a rocky support. His left leg is crossed, with the foot resting on his right thigh, as he attentively seeks to extract a thorn that has become embedded in his foot. On a separately-cast rectangular base. The bronze statue of the Spinario is a Roman copy, generally thought to have been made in the first century A.D., of a long lost Hellenistic Greek bronze, perhaps made in the 3rd century B.C. The Spinario was one of the best-known Classical sculptures in the early Renaissance. It is first recorded as early as c. 1165-67, when it stood outside the Lateran Palace in Rome. At some point after 1471, it was transferred to the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitol by Pope Sixtus IV. Except for the years 1797-1816, when it was removed by the French to Paris, it has remained there ever since. The Spinario became highly celebrated in the later fifteenth century, already at this early date being copied, in paintings, prints and in small bronzes, for example those by the sculptors Antico (Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi, c. 1460–1528) and Severo Calzetta (Severo da Ravenna, fl. 1496 – before 1538). A bronze inkstand from the workshop of Severo da Ravenna featuring the Spinario is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Inv. WA 1899CDEFB1078; Warren 2014, no. 35). The popularity of the Spinario continued into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The well-made reduction at the Argory is likely to be a product of a Roman foundry, probably made in the decades after the sculpture’s return from Paris in 1816. There is a full-size copy in marble at Felbrigg (NT 1401974), and smaller ones in marble and alabaster at Castle Ward (NT 836673) and at Stourhead (NT 730661). Jeremy Warren September 2022
Provenance
By descent; Walter McGeough Bond (1908-86), by whom given to the National Trust in 1979.
Makers and roles
Italian School, sculptor
References
Haskell and Penny 1981: Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique, The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500 - 1900, New Haven and London, 1981, pp. 308-10, no. 78. Warren 2014: Jeremy Warren, Medieval and Renaissance Sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum, 3 vols., Oxford 2014, no. 35.