Images of

the Week

Barefooting related images and material:

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Spinario: "Boy removing thorn from foot". I first saw this statue in the Welsh national museum in Cardiff when I was a child. I remember being quite fascinated by it (How did he get to go barefoot and I didn't?). I had no idea it that it was so old. The hazards of barefooting really haven't changed.

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The Hellenistic interest in realistic treatment of the more commonplace events of man is to be seen in this delicate and sympathetic work. The statue is also known as Spinario, or Boy Plucking a Thorn from the Foot. It was first named Fedele (Faithful) because it was thought that it was a portrait of Marcius, a Roman messenger who would not delay his mission even though he was painfully tortured by a thorn in his foot. The statue stands in the center of a room in the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome. A copy is also to be found in the Uffize gallery in Florence. boythorn8.jpeg (61086 bytes) boythorn9.jpg (49786 bytes)

Ancient bronze statue of a seated boy extracting a thorn from his left foot (Capitoline Museum, Rome). It is recorded in Rome as early as the 12th century and during the Renaissance it was one of the most influential of ancient sculptures. Among the many copies that were made of it was a statuette by Antico for Isabella d'Este. Its fame endured and it was one of the ancient works taken by Napoleon to Paris, where it remained from 1798 to 1815. Various stories grew up from the Renaissance onwards to explain the subject, the most popular being that the statue commemorates a shepherd boy called Martius who delivered an important message to the Roman Senate and only when his task was accomplished stopped to remove a thorn from his foot. It is now generally thought that the Spinario is a Roman pastiche of about the 1st century BC, combining a Hellenistic body with a head of earlier date (the way in which the hair falls indicates that the head was meant to be in an upright position rather than looking down).