# Boy with Thorn (Spinario) > Unknown Greco-Roman bronze-caster - Disputed: 1st century BC (Musei Capitolini) or 1st century AD (Wolfgang Helbig); the body reproduces a Hellenistic type of the 3rd-2nd century BC, the head is adapted from, or copied after, a Greek archaic-style prototype of about the 5th century BC > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/unknown-greco-roman-bronze-caster-spinario/spinario-capitoline-museums/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-21 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unknown Greco-Roman bronze-caster - **Date:** Disputed: 1st century BC (Musei Capitolini) or 1st century AD (Wolfgang Helbig); the body reproduces a Hellenistic type of the 3rd-2nd century BC, the head is adapted from, or copied after, a Greek archaic-style prototype of about the 5th century BC - **Medium:** Bronze, hollow cast - **Dimensions:** 73 cm high (inv. MC1186) - **Object type:** Antiquity - **Period:** Hellenistic-Roman, composite - **Current location:** Musei Capitolini (Capitoline Museums), Palazzo dei Conservatori, Sala dei Trionfi, Rome - **Attribution:** disputed ## Summary A small bronze of a boy pulling a thorn from his foot, 73 centimetres high, that has stood at the center of Rome's civic art collection since Pope Sixtus IV gave it, with the Capitoline Wolf and two other ancient bronzes, to the Roman People in 1471 - an act framed at the time as restitution rather than gift, and widely cited as founding the oldest public museum collection in the world. It had already stood at the Lateran Palace for at least three centuries by then, seen and described, with varying admiration, by a twelfth-century Jewish traveller and an English scholar who called it ridiculous.The bronze itself is a puzzle scholars have not settled: a naturalistic Hellenistic body paired with a stiffer, archaic-style head that no surviving marble version of the same subject shares, cast either in the 1st century BC, on the Capitoline Museums' own dating, or a century later, on Wolfgang Helbig's. It became one of the first ancient statues systematically copied by Renaissance artists and sent as a diplomatic gift between crowns - to Francis I, to Philip II, to Charles I - and it has never once left Roman, and later Italian, custody to be sold. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **Disputed: 1st century BC or 1st century AD** Unrecorded `[disputed]` (casting) The bronze is cast, combining a Hellenistic body type of the 3rd-2nd century BC with a head derived from, or adapted from, a Greek prototype of about the 5th century BC. The Musei Capitolini's own catalogue dates the casting to the 1st century BC; Wolfgang Helbig argued for the 1st century AD. Where, by whom, and for what original setting or function it was made is not established in any source consulted. - **Casting-1160s** Unrecorded `[unknown]` (gap) No text, find record or other source consulted for this entry documents the bronze's location, ownership or use for however many centuries separate its casting from its first appearance in the written record at the Lateran in the twelfth century. - **c. 1165-1167** Papal Lateran Palace, Rome `[disputed]` (first possible documentary sighting) Benjamin of Tudela, a Navarrese Jewish traveller, records statues at the Lateran including one he calls Absalom; Paul Borchardt's 1936 study argues for a 1166 visit specifically. Later scholarship identifies this Absalom with the surviving bronze Spinario, but the surviving English translation of Benjamin's Hebrew text does not itself describe a boy removing a thorn, and Borchardt notes that manuscript and translation traditions of the passage vary. This record treats the identification as disputed rather than certain. - **Mid-twelfth century or c. 1200 (disputed)** Papal Lateran Palace, Rome `[documented]` (documentary sighting) Magister Gregorius, an English scholar, records the same bronze among the ancient bronzes at the Lateran in his De mirabilibus urbis Romae, calling it a highly ridiculous statue and identifying it as Priapus. That he saw and described this specific bronze is treated here as documented; the exact date of his visit and text is disputed among the sources consulted, some placing it in the mid-twelfth century and others around 1200. - **1471** The People of Rome, custody at the Capitoline `[documented]` (donation (recorded by an on-site inscription as restitution)) Pope Sixtus IV transfers a group of ancient bronzes formerly at the Lateran - the Capitoline Wolf, the Camillus, the Spinario, and the colossal bronze head, hand and globe now catalogued as Constantine the Great - to the Roman People. An inscription in the Palazzo dei Conservatori frames the act as restitution of the city's own ancient patrimony rather than as a papal gift. The act is widely cited as founding the Capitoline Museums. - **1471-1499-1500** The People of Rome `[unknown]` (gap) The Spinario is not itself specifically documented at the Palazzo dei Conservatori until 1499-1500, roughly three decades after the 1471 gift. Its precise location and handling in the interim are not stated in the sources consulted. - **1499-1500-present** The People of Rome / Musei Capitolini, Palazzo dei Conservatori `[documented]` (continuous institutional custody) First specifically recorded at the Palazzo dei Conservatori in 1499-1500. The Capitoline Museums opened to public visitors in 1734 under Clement XII. The Spinario has remained on display there, currently in the Sala dei Trionfi, without recorded sale, loss or export, through to the present day. ## Open questions - Where in antiquity did the bronze originally stand, and for what purpose or in what setting? No ancient text or find record consulted for this entry addresses the question at all. - Was the bronze cast in the 1st century BC, as the Musei Capitolini's own catalogue states, or in the 1st century AD, as Wolfgang Helbig argued? The two positions are not reconciled in the sources consulted. - Is the head a later graft onto an already-cast Hellenistic body, or was the whole composite figure conceived and cast together as a deliberate archaizing pastiche from the outset? The absence of any matching head on the surviving marble versions of the type argues for some form of graft or substitution, but does not by itself settle which. - Does the identification of Benjamin of Tudela's 'Absalom' (visited c. 1165-1167) with the surviving bronze Spinario hold up against the full manuscript tradition of his Hebrew text, which Paul Borchardt's 1936 study shows varies between versions? The English translation consulted for this record does not itself describe a boy pulling a thorn from his foot. - When did Magister Gregorius actually visit Rome and write De mirabilibus urbis Romae - the mid-twelfth century, as M. R. James's original identification suggested, or around 1200, as later accounts place it? Sources consulted for this record disagree and the question is not resolved here. - Where was the Spinario physically located between the 1471 Sixtus IV donation and its first specific documentary record at the Palazzo dei Conservatori in 1499-1500 - a gap of roughly three decades? - Does any published metallurgical, alloy-composition or casting-core study of this specific bronze exist in the Italian conservation literature? None was located in the course of this research. - Was the bronze moved, hidden or otherwise specially protected during the 1527 Sack of Rome, or during the Allied bombing and German occupation of Rome in 1943-44? No account addressing either episode was located. - Which, if any, of the named early modern bronze casts (Antico's, the Fancelli-Sansovino-Cellini cast for Francis I, Le Sueur's for Charles I, Guglielmo della Porta's Aranjuez version) was taken directly from the Capitoline original, as against from an intermediate cast? The sources consulted do not establish this for any of them. ## Sources - [1] Wikipedia, 'Boy with Thorn', aggregating and citing Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500-1900 (Yale University Press, 1981), cat. no. 78, pp. 308-310; Paul Borchardt, 'The Sculpture in front of the Lateran as described by Benjamin of Tudela and Magister Gregorius', Journal of Roman Studies 26 (1936), pp. 68-70; Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (1969), p. 7f; Richard Cocke, 'Masaccio and the Spinario, Piero and the Pothos', Zeitschrift fuer Kunstgeschichte 43.1 (1980), pp. 21-32; Phyllis P. Bober and R. Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources (London and Oxford, 1986), p. 235, no. 203; and Wolfgang Helbig, Fuehrer durch die oeffentlichen Sammlungen klassischer Altertuemer in Rom, 4th ed. (Tuebingen, 1963-72), vol. II, pp. 266-68. Tertiary; flagged for eventual replacement by direct consultation of each underlying work. - [2] Wikipedia, 'De mirabilibus urbis Romae'. Tertiary; flagged for replacement with R. B. C. Huygens's critical edition (Brill, 1970) or John Osborne's English translation and commentary, The Marvels of Rome. - [3] Wikipedia, 'Magister Gregorius'. Tertiary; same flag as source 2. - [4] Wikipedia, 'Capitoline Museums', for the 1471 founding narrative, the 'restitution' inscription, and the separate acquisition histories of the Capitoline Wolf, Capitoline Brutus and Capitoline Antinous. Tertiary. - [5] Wikipedia, 'Bronze colossus of Constantine', for the scholarly debate over which earlier imperial image the surviving bronze head, hand and globe may have been reworked from. Tertiary; cited only to distinguish this companion object from the Spinario. - [6] Musei Capitolini (official website), catalogue entry 'Spinario': material, dimensions, inventory MC1186, dating to the 1st century BC as a composite of a Hellenistic body type and an archaic-derived head, and display location. - [7] Musei Capitolini (official website), 'Foundation and first acquisitions', on the 1471 Sixtus IV donation, the objects named, the 'restitution' framing, and the 1734 public opening. - [8] Musei Capitolini (official website), exhibition page for 'Spinario. Storia e fortuna', 5 February - 25 May 2014, curated by Claudio Parisi Presicce. - [9] Wikimedia Commons, File:Spinario BM 1755.jpg, description of the British Museum's marble Thorn-puller (Castellani collection, said found on the Esquiline, Roman copy c. 25-50 AD after a lost Hellenistic original of the 3rd century BC), photograph by Jastrow, 2006. - [10] Museo Nacional del Prado, catalogue entry 'The Boy with the Thorn (The Spinario)': the Madrid-cast bronze after a c. 1560 Spinario attributed to Guglielmo della Porta, itself remaining at Aranjuez, and the Prado cast's documented presence in the Royal Alcazar (by 1700) and New Royal Palace (1747, 1789). - [11] Uffizi Galleries, catalogue entry 'Boy with Thorn, also known as Spinario': the Uffizi's own Roman marble version, 1st century BC, from the Medici collections, distinct from the Capitoline bronze. - [12] Wikipedia, 'Vanitas with the Spinario', on Pieter Claesz's 1628 painting, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (SK-A-3930), which incorporates a small reproduction of the Spinario. - [13] Wikimedia Commons, File:Spinario Musei Capitolini MC1186.jpg, photograph by Marie-Lan Nguyen ('Jastrow'), 2009, public domain, confirming inventory number and dating description. - [14] Wikimedia Commons, File:0 Spinaro - Palazzo dei Conservatori, Musei Capitolini (1).JPG, photograph by Jean-Pol Grandmont, 2011, CC BY-SA 3.0. - [15] Wikimedia Commons / Metropolitan Museum of Art, File:Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae- Man Removing a Thorn from his Foot MET DP820276.jpg, engraving attributed to Marco Dente (d. 1527), CC0. - [16] Benjamin of Tudela, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela: Travels in the Middle Ages, trans. Marcus Nathan Adler, reproduced in the Project Gutenberg edition, for the primary-source passage on the statues of Samson, Absalom and Constantine before the Lateran. - [17] Cambridge Core, abstract of Paul Borchardt, 'The Sculpture in front of the Lateran as described by Benjamin of Tudela and Magister Gregorius', Journal of Roman Studies 26 (1936), pp. 68-70, consulted for Borchardt's dating of Benjamin's visit to 1166 and his discussion of variant manuscript traditions of the passage. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.