Boy with Thorn

Spinario – a bronze sculpture dating back to the 1st century BCE, depicting a boy extracting a thorn from his foot.

The sculpture portrays a boy sitting on a rock, attempting to pull a thorn from his left foot, which is propped on his right knee. The piece is considered a Roman pastiche inspired by Greek sculpture. The boy’s body is typical of Hellenistic art, while his head references works from the 5th century BCE, characteristic of standing figures’ statues.

The earliest mentions of Spinario come from medieval accounts by Benjamin of Tudela (12th century) and Master Gregory (12th/13th century). It was then positioned atop a marble column in front of the Lateran Palace. Benjamin of Tudela, inspired by a passage from the Second Book of Samuel, identified the boy as Absalom, while Master Gregory believed it depicted Priapus. In 1471, by order of Pope Sixtus IV, the sculpture was moved to the newly built Palazzo dei Conservatori (now part of the Capitoline Museums). In 1798, the sculpture was seized by the French following Napoleon Bonaparte’s brilliant Italian campaign and transported to Paris, where it was placed in the Louvre. After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, it returned to Rome in early 1816.

Many legends have arisen around the figure depicted in the sculpture, the most popular of which names the boy as Gnaeus Marius. When tasked with delivering a message to the senate, he fulfilled his duty with such dedication that he did not remove the thorn, which had pierced his foot during the journey, until he reached his destination.

The sculpture served as an inspiration for Renaissance artists. It was frequently copied in marble and bronze, including by Antonello Gagini for the decoration of the fountain in Palazzo Alcontres in Messina, and the boy’s pose was utilized by Brunelleschi in the scene of the Sacrifice of Isaac in the design for the Baptistery doors in Florence and by Botticelli in the painting The Trials of Moses.

The Dohrn Collection at the National Museum in Szczecin includes reconstructions of the most famous Greek bronze sculptures, representing the pinnacle of Greek art in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE and the Hellenistic period (4th-1st centuries BCE) – mostly lost but known from many Roman copies.

This carefully curated exhibition included an excellent collection of 60 vases and small sculptures, as well as a collection of 100 reconstructions of famous ancient sculptures, originally made of bronze but known only from marble copies mass-produced much later, in Roman times. Aware of his status as a noble-minded amateur, Dohrn invited the most prominent archaeologist of his era, Adolf Furtwängler, and his students, including Paul Wolters and Johannes Sieveking, to collaborate. Consequently, a magnificent exhibition of ancient art was quickly established in Szczecin.

The Szczecin reconstruction, made using the traditional bronze casting technique employed in antiquity, excellently captures the color and texture of ancient Greek sculpture.