Boy with a Thorn

Over these past couple weeks we have discussed many different Hellenistic sculptures. Almost all of these show the person with emotion or pain in their face. In my research for these last few weeks I came across the sculpture of a boy pulling a thorn out of his foot. I found this sculpture interesting, because it is credited as being Hellenistic, but the boy shows very little emotion in his face.

This sculpture is a Greco-Roman bronze. Some speculate that is was made around 50 B.C. This sculpture is also sometimes called Spinario, and a marble copy of it was made sometime between 25-50 CE. It now resides in the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome.

This sculpture is quite different if you compare it to many of the other Hellenistic sculptures at the time. The main reason being that the boy's face shows very little emotion, or pain when pulling out the thorn. One of the defining traits of Hellenistic art is that the subject has great emotions, but this trait is not present here.

For example, we talked about the Boxer at rest (show below). Here you can see weariness in the face of the boxer compared to the monotone face of the boy with thorn.


Here you can see some close up pictures of the boy's face and a marble copy of the sculpture.