Spinario

This statuette is possibly made around 1900 after an antique prototype now in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome.

The Spinario is also called 'Boy with Thorn' or 'Fedele (Fedelino)' and is a Greco-Roman Hellenistic Bronze sculpture of a boy pulling a thorn from the sole of his foot. It is one of a few large-scale bronze works to survive from antiquity and had a huge influence on Renaissance artists. It was also one of the most copied antique sculptures. It is thought to be a Roman pastiche from ca. the 1st century BC, using a Hellenistic body with a head of an earlier date. Napoleon confiscated the statue and brought it to Paris, where it lived from 1798 to 1815.