Boy with Thorn

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 ("illustration, right"). A Roman marble of this subject from the Medici collections is in a corridor of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. [P. P. Bober and R. Rubinstein, "Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources," (London and Oxford) 1986, p. 235, no. 203.]

The sculpture was one of the very few Roman bronzes that was never lost to sight. It 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." [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.] , 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 (Haskell and Penny 1981: 308). It was celebrated in the Early Renaissance, 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: he made a copy for Isabella d'Este about 1501 [Now in the Galleria Estense, Modena; see A. Paolucci, "I Gonzaga e l’Antico percorso di Palazzo Ducale a Mantova" (Rome, 1988), p. 40, fig. 27.] and followed it with a pendant that perhaps reversed the pose. For a fountain of 1500 in Messina, Antonello Gagini made a full-size variant, probably the bronze that is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.In the sixteenth century, bronze copies made suitably magnificent ambassadorial gifts to the King of France and the King of Spain. For François I, the gift came from Ippolito II d'Este [It is in the Musée du Louvre.] ; his copy was overseen by Giovanni Fancelli and Jacopo Sansovino, and the transaction effected by the courtly Benvenuto Cellini. For Philip II of Spain, the copy was the gift of Cardinal Giovanni Ricci. In the following century Charles I of England had a bronze "Spinario" by Hubert Le Sueur (Haskell and Penny 1981: 308).

Small bronze reductions were suitable for the less grand. A "Still Life with 'Spinario"' by Pieter Claesz, 1628, is conserved at the Rijksmuseum; among the riches emblemmatic of the good life, it displays a small plaster model of the "Spinario". [ [http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/aria/aria_assets/SK-A-3930?lang=en&context_space=&context_id= Rijksmuseum website illustration] ; it is also illustrated in "Gardner's Art Through the Ages", II, ch. 24 fig. 55.]

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 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, and it has been discussed whether Masaccio was influenced by the Medici "Spinario" or by the bronze he saw in Rome in the 1420s, [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.] , but Filippo Brunelleschi more certainly adapted the "Spinario"'s pose for the left-hand attendant in the bronze competition panel, "The Sacrifice of Isaac" 1401, his trial piece for the doors of the Baptistery of San Giovanni. [In the end Lorenzo Ghiberti's panels were executed. ]

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 [Haskell and Penny 1981: 308, note 22.]

Recent scholarship, 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 ("illustration, left"), [ [http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/gr/m/marble_statue_of_the_spinario.aspx British Museum: Collection Highlights] ] none of which have the archaizing qualities of the bronze "Spinario", has tended to credit this as a Roman bronze of the first century CE, with a head adapted from an archaic prototype (Helbig, noted by Haskell and Penny 1981: 308, note 33)

Notes

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 öffentlich Sammlungen klassischer Altertümer in Rom" 4th ed., Tubingen 1963-72, vol II, pp 266-68.

External links

* [http://www.mega.it/ita/gui/monu/ufuu.htm Guida Artistica di Firenze: Sculture Antiche] Illustrates the Roman marble Spinario in the Uffizi
* [http://home.planet.nl/~stilus.nl/stilus.nl/mag-greg/mg-v-07d.htm Johannes Röll, "The Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance"] Section on the "Spinario" ("Dornauszieher").