The “Spinario” from Priene, parody of a masterpiece

This small clay figurine from the Ionian city of Priene, the “Pompeii of Asia Minor,” is not only one of the most renowned finds from the excavations led by Carl Humann and Theodor Wiegand in 1895–1899: it is one of the most famous ancient terracottas ever found. Its fame is due to the fact that it reproduces a large-scale sculpture as popular in antiquity as in the modern period, the so-called Spinario. And beyond simply copying the illustrious model on a smaller scale, this statuette actually parodies it.
The sculptural type originated in the late third century BC and is preserved in copies from the Imperial Roman period. Most are marble sculptures – including the example in the Antikensammlung, cat. no. 133 – but one bronze copy (the namesake for the type) resides in the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline hill in Rome. Despite the varying details among the six extant life-size copies, all of them depict the same subject: a nude youth seated on a rock, his left leg laid across his right knee, his torso bent forward as he tries to pull a thorn out of the ball of his left foot. Only two of the statues retain their heads, one of them being the bronze statue in the Palazzo dei Conservatori. However, whether the head originally belonged to the statue has recently been called into question. Although the two preserved heads are very different from each other, they share the fact that neither wears a cap of any sort.
The Berlin terracotta departs from the marble and bronze statues in two important ways already mentioned above. Aside from its reduced size, the Priene Spinario also differs from the large-scale copies in its clothing. A sash crosses the torso and is knotted at the left shoulder, a flat felt cap covers the head, and an armband encircles the left upper arm. The facial features, meanwhile, are a grotesque distortion of the large-scale Spinario head. The overlong jaw, lips pressed together, inflated cheeks, wide flat nose, squinty eyes, and high forehead rippling with wrinkles go beyond even the “naturalistic” head on the Castellani copy of the Spinario in the British Museum. In dress and physiognomy the man depicted in the terracotta is “banausic,” representing a class of coarse, uneducated people that would include shepherds. In keeping with the caricature, the genitals of this figure are depicted rather larger than the Greeks considered proper – and are exposed to the viewer by virtue of the young shepherd’s unseemly pose. The proposal by several scholars that the figure portrays an African man is not compelling.
This statuette is an ambitious, original reinterpretation of the large-scale statue. Both the model and the reinterpretation stand in the tradition of Hellenistic bucolic poetry, whose primary exponent was Theocritus. The genre thematized the life of simple people living off the land and gave it a humorous spin. As a decorative element perhaps in the andron (men’s banquet room) of the Priene house, surrounded by other artworks in clay and marble, the statuette not only parodies but expands on its model – even adding an armband of Aphrodite! Securely dated by context to the period before 135 BC, this piece is the oldest known version of the lost original statue.