Boy with Thorn

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Spinario
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Palazzo dei Conservatori, Musei Capitolini
).

Boy with Thorn, also called Fedele (Fedelino) or Spinario, is a Greco-Roman

Uffizi Gallery, Florence.[1]

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.[

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.

Musée 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[

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,
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

In Thomas Mann's 1912 novella Death in Venice, Gustav von Aschenbach compares Tadzio's beauty to the Spinario.

Notes

  1. ^ Phyllis P. Bober and R. Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources, (London and Oxford) 1986, p. 235, no. 203.
  2. Magister Gregorius
    ", Journal of Roman Studies, 26 (1936), pp. 68–70, noted in Haskell and Penny 1981:308 note 20.
  3. ^ Quoted by Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, 1969:7f.
  4. ^ Haskell and Penny 1981: 308.
  5. ^ Paolucci, A. I Gonzaga e l’Antico percorso di Palazzo Ducale a Mantova (Rome, 1988), p. 40, fig. 27.
  6. ^ British Museum Compass site: GR 1880.8-7.1 (Sculpture 1755)
  7. ^ Haskell and Penny 1981: 308
  8. ^ 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.
  9. ^ Richard Cocke, "Masaccio and the Spinario, Piero and the Pothos: Observations on the Reception of the Antique in Renaissance Painting", Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 43.1 (1980), pp. 21–32.
  10. ^ In the end Lorenzo Ghiberti's panels were chosen for the doors.
  11. ^ Haskell and Penny 1981: 308, note 22.
  12. ^ British Museum: Collection Highlights
  13. ^ Helbig, noted by Haskell and Penny 1981: 308, note 33.

References

  • 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, Führer durch die öffentlichen Sammlungen klassischer Altertümer in Rom 4th ed., Tübingen 1963–72, vol II, pp 266–68.

External links

Media related to The Spinario at Wikimedia Commons

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