#spinario

Francesco Bertinatti

Spinario

Hellenistic, about 200-100 BCE

discovery: Esquiline Hill, Rome

British Museum

Lo Spinario

Lo Spinario (The Thorn-Picker), also called Boy with Thorn. Roman bronze copy/assemblage from Greek original pieces, Capitoline Museums, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome

Perhaps he is the young Podalirius, son of Asclepius.

Or Ascanius (or Iulus), son of Aeneas and Creusa, the forefather of the Julian clan. – Italian ways

Recent scholarship has tended to credit this as a Roman bronze of the first century AD, with a head adapted from an archaic prototype. – wiki

The “Boy with Thorn” very likely is the work of a Greek artist from the 1st century BC, and is currently thought by experts to have been made by soldering various pre-existent parts – Italian ways

Of especial interest is a variant of two figures: a Satyr being assisted by Pan to extract a thorn from his foot. Similar examples are found in the Museum of Ostia, the Louvre and the Vatican – The Theme of the «Spinario» in Byzantine Art (pdf)

MWW Artwork of the Day (8/18/21) Antico (Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi)(Italian, c. 1460–1528) Spinario (Boy Pulling a Thorn from His Foot)(c. 1496) Bronze sculpture, partially gilt (hair) and silvered (eyes), 19.7 cm. high The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York (Gift of Mrs. Charles Wrightsman)

This is the best surviving example of Antico’s Spinario -– a boy pulling a thorn from his foot – which takes as its starting point a long-celebrated bronze figure, executed in the 3rd century BC and now, as in Antico’s day, to be admired in Rome. The composition is the same as that of the Hellenistic bronze, but this is much more than a reproduction.  Antico subtly animates the figure, conveying the boy’s tension as he performs his tricky –- and potentially painful – task. And he renders the piece, and the past itself, more precious by gilding the boy’s curling hair and silvering his eyes. We become witnesses to two acts of concentration (using both senses of the word): the youth’s, and the artist’s. The Spinario became thereby the perfect ornament for the study of the dedicated scholar-prince. (from the MMA catalog)