Boy with Thorn

[clarification needed] The work was standing outside the Lateran Palace when the Navarrese rabbi Benjamin of Tudela saw it in the 1160s and identified it as Absalom, who "was without blemish from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.

There are bronze reductions by Severo da Ravenna and Jacopo Buonaccolsi (called "L'Antico" for his refined, classicizing figures).

In 1500, Antonello Gagini made a full-size variant for a fountain in Messina, which is probably the bronze version that now resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

[9] However, Filippo Brunelleschi more certainly adapted the Spinario's pose for the left-hand attendant in 1401 for his bronze panel The Sacrifice of Isaac, which was his trial piece for the competition to design the doors of the Baptistery of San Giovanni.

The formerly popular title Il Fedele ("The faithful boy") derived from an anecdote invented to give this intimate and naturalistic study a more heroic civic setting: the faithful messenger, a mere shepherd boy, had delivered his message to the Roman Senate first, only then stopping to remove a painful thorn from his foot: the Roman Senate commemorated the event.

[13] In Thomas Mann's 1912 novella Death in Venice, Gustav von Aschenbach compares Tadzio's beauty to the Spinario.

Lo Spinario ( Palazzo dei Conservatori, Musei Capitolini ).
Dornauszieher ("thorn puller") by Gustav Eberlein between 1879 and 1885. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
Roman marble c.25–50 AD, copy of lost 3rd century BC Hellenistic original of the type, from the Castellani collection, Rome. Said to have been found on the Esquiline . The base of the statue is worked as a rock, with a hole for a fountain pipe. ( British Museum ) [ 6 ]