Spinario

Of this marble statue only the torso is original; the head, arms, legs, rock and plinth were added by the sculptor Emil Wolff, after an early Augustan bronze figure in the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome. This so-called 'Spinario' was apparently never lost. It is mentioned as early as the twelfth century, and from the Renaissance on it attracted great praise, and was frequently drawn and copied. It represents a boy sitting on a rock with his left foot on his right upper thigh. He is bent forward, intent on pulling a thorn from the sole of his foot with his right thumb and forefinger. The composition draws the gaze toward the hand and the injured foot. Though the youth's posture is very natural, the long hair here, as in the earlier bronze copy, does not hang down loosely but is artfully arranged: for the head with its classical profile did not belong to this boy's body. The Roman copyist had grafted onto the Hellenistic figure the head of a standing boy from a Greek original of around 460 BCE - a stylistic disjuncture often found in Roman copies of Greek statues.