An art student sketches the Spinario

An art student sketches the Spinario, a bronze statue showing a Roman boy pulling a thorn from his foot, in the Capitoline Museum. The statue commemorates the devotion to duty and self-sacrifice of a young messenger named Martius, who did not stop to remove the painful thorn until he had delivered his message. These were qualities most admired by the ancient Romans.

Not far from the girl at the left she is being watched by the bronze bust of a grizzled old Roman patriarch, the so-called Brutus. Brutus and Spinario have been on display here since the fifteenth century--the Capitoline was the first public museum in the world, set up by the city government during the Renaissance to remind the people of their former greatness.

On the same spot where this young artist is standing, Michelangelo, Bernini, and Rodin may have drawn the Spinario in their own youthful sketchbooks.

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