Inv.-Nr. 401

Sog. Dornauszieher

Rom, Konservatorenpalast 1186
augusteische Kopie eines Originals aus dem 3. Jh. v. Chr.

This famous statue is known both in its original bronze form, dating to the Hellenistic period, and also from several copies made in marble during the Roman period. It shows a young boy seated on a rock, picking a thorn from his foot. For this reason, he is sometimes known as the ‘Spinario’.

In antiquity, many statues were originally cast in bronze. However, relatively few of these have survived to the present day, as most were melted down over the centuries and their metal reused for other purposes. The Spinario is one of the few Hellenistic bronzes that survive, and was on display in Rome throughout the medieval period.

During the Renaissance, the sculpture became the focus of many stories and theories, the most famous being that it depicted a young shepherd boy called Gnaeus Martius who ran to deliver an important message to the Roman Senate, and only afterwards stopped to remove a thorn that had become stuck in his foot. We now think that the sculpture was created in the first century BCE, sticking an earlier head onto a Hellenistic body. If you look closely at the way that the hair falls around the face, it seems that the face was originally meant to stand upright. This is a statue which has a long and complex history, and which underwent several changes and transformations before reaching us today.

Both parts of statue (both body and head) show an interest in depicting children, not merely as small adults, but more realistically in childlike form. The features and hairstyle are unmistakeably those of a youth, while the soft and slim limbs are notably different from those of a mature adult. This is a boy on the cusp of puberty, caught between childhood and adulthood, captured in a moment of pause between one activity and another.