Greco-Roman Hellenistic bronze sculpture
Lo Spinario
(
Palazzo dei Conservatori, Musei Capitolini
).
Boy with Thorn
, also called
Fedele
(
Fedelino
) or
Spinario
, is a Greco-Roman
Hellenistic
bronze sculpture of a boy withdrawing a
thorn
from the sole of his foot, now in the
Palazzo dei Conservatori
,
Rome
. There is a Roman marble version of this subject from the
Medici
collections in a corridor of the
Uffizi Gallery
,
Florence
.
[1]
![](//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/94/Dornauszieher_%28Eberlein%2C_1879-85%29.JPG/220px-Dornauszieher_%28Eberlein%2C_1879-85%29.JPG)
Dornauszieher
("thorn puller") by
Gustav Eberlein
between 1879 and 1885. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
The sculpture was one of the very few Roman bronzes that was never lost to sight.
[
clarification needed
]
The work was standing outside the
Lateran Palace
when the
Navarrese
rabbi
Benjamin of Tudela
saw it in the 1160s and identified it as
Absalom
, who "was without blemish from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head."
[2]
It was noted around 1200 by the English visitor, Magister Gregorius, who noted in his
De mirabilibus urbis Romae
that it was ridiculously thought to be
Priapus
.
[3]
It must have been one of the sculptures transferred to the Palazzo dei Conservatori by
Pope Sixtus IV
in the 1470s, though it is not recorded there until 1499?1500.
[4]
In the Early Renaissance, it was celebrated through being one of the first Roman sculptures to be copied. There are bronze reductions by
Severo da Ravenna
and
Jacopo Buonaccolsi
(called "L'Antico" for his refined, classicizing figures). Buonaccolsi made a copy for
Isabella d'Este
around 1501 that is now in the Galleria Estense, Modena.
[5]
He followed that work with an untraced
pendant
that perhaps reversed the pose. In 1500,
Antonello Gagini
made a full-size variant for a fountain in
Messina
, which is probably the bronze version that now resides in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art
, New York.
Roman marble c.25?50 AD, copy of lost 3rd century BC Hellenistic original of the type, from the Castellani collection, Rome. Said to have been found on the
Esquiline
. The base of the statue is worked as a rock, with a hole for a fountain pipe. (
British Museum
)
[6]
In the sixteenth century, bronze copies made suitably magnificent ambassadorial gifts to the King of France and the King of Spain.
Francis I of France
was given a version by
Ippolito II d'Este
. The making of this copy was overseen by
Giovanni Fancelli
and
Jacopo Sansovino
, and the transaction effected by the courtly
Benvenuto Cellini
. It now is held in the
Musee du Louvre
.
Philip II of Spain
received a copy from Cardinal
Giovanni Ricci
. In the following century,
Charles I of England
had a bronze
Spinario
made by
Hubert Le Sueur
.
[7]
Small bronze reductions were suitable for the less grand. A
Still Life with 'Spinario'
by
Pieter Claesz
, 1628, is conserved at the
Rijksmuseum
, and among the riches emblematic of the good life, it displays a small plaster model of the
Spinario
.
[8]
Later remakes, one such example can be seen in The Oliver Mansion, South Bend Indiana.
There were also marble copies. The Medici Roman marble seems to have been among the collection of antiquities assembled in the gardens at San Marco, Florence, which were the resort
[
clarification needed
]
of the humanists in the circle of
Lorenzo il Magnifico
, who opened his collection to young artists to study from. The young
Michelangelo
profited from this early exposure to antique sculpture.
[
clarification needed
]
and it has been discussed whether
Masaccio
was influenced by the Medici
Spinario
or by the bronze he saw in Rome in the 1420s.
[9]
However,
Filippo Brunelleschi
more certainly adapted the
Spinario'
s pose for the left-hand attendant in 1401 for his bronze panel
The Sacrifice of Isaac
, which was his trial piece for the competition to design the doors of the
Baptistery of San Giovanni
.
[
clarification needed
]
[10]
There is a copy in the entrance lobby of Newcastle University School of Medical Science.
The formerly popular title
Il Fedele
("The faithful boy") derived from an anecdote invented to give this intimate and naturalistic study a more heroic civic setting: the faithful messenger, a mere shepherd boy, had delivered his message to the Roman Senate first, only then stopping to remove a painful thorn from his foot: the Roman Senate commemorated the event. Such a story was already deflated in Paolo Alessandro Maffei's
Raccolta di statue antiche e moderni...
of 1704.
[11]
Taking into account Hellenistic marble variants that have been discovered, of which the best is the
Thorn-Puller
from the Castellani collection now in the
British Museum
,
[12]
none of which have the archaizing qualities of the bronze
Spinario
, recent scholarship has tended to credit this as a Roman bronze of the first century AD, with a head adapted from an archaic prototype.
[13]
In popular culture
[
edit
]
In
Thomas Mann
's 1912 novella
Death in Venice
, Gustav von Aschenbach compares Tadzio's beauty to the Spinario.
Notes
[
edit
]
- ^
Phyllis P. Bober and R. Rubinstein,
Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources,
(London and Oxford) 1986, p. 235, no. 203.
- ^
Paul Borchardt, "The sculpture in front of the Lateran as described by Bejamin of Tudela and
Magister Gregorius
",
Journal of Roman Studies
,
26
(1936), pp. 68–70, noted in Haskell and Penny 1981:308 note 20.
- ^
Quoted by Roberto Weiss,
The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity
, 1969:7f.
- ^
Haskell and Penny 1981: 308.
- ^
Paolucci, A.
I Gonzaga e l’Antico percorso di Palazzo Ducale a Mantova
(Rome, 1988), p. 40, fig. 27.
- ^
British Museum Compass site
: GR 1880.8-7.1 (
Sculpture
1755)
- ^
Haskell and Penny 1981: 308
- ^
Rijksmuseum website illustration
Archived
2008-02-15 at the
Wayback Machine
; it is also illustrated in
Gardner's Art Through the Ages
, II, ch. 24 fig. 55.
- ^
Richard Cocke, "Masaccio and the Spinario, Piero and the Pothos: Observations on the Reception of the Antique in Renaissance Painting",
Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte
,
43
.1 (1980), pp. 21–32.
- ^
In the end
Lorenzo Ghiberti
's panels were chosen for the doors.
- ^
Haskell and Penny 1981: 308, note 22.
- ^
British Museum: Collection Highlights
- ^
Helbig, noted by Haskell and Penny 1981: 308, note 33.
References
[
edit
]
- Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, 1981.
Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500-1900.
(Yale University Press) Catalogue number 78, pp 308?10.
- Wolfgang Helbig,
Fuhrer durch die offentlichen Sammlungen klassischer Altertumer in Rom
4th ed., Tubingen 1963?72, vol II, pp 266?68.
External links
[
edit
]
Media related to
The Spinario
at Wikimedia Commons
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