Spinario (Boy with Thorn)

In 1401 Florence held a competition for a second pair of bronze doors for its Baptistery, and each contestant had to cast a trial panel of the sacrifice of Isaac. Filippo Brunelleschi gave one of Abraham's servants, sitting at the left, the pose of this boy, bent over his raised foot to pull out a thorn. The commission went to Lorenzo Ghiberti, and Brunelleschi's panel is now in the Bargello museum in Florence.

He was not the last to borrow it. The bronze became one of the most admired and most copied statues of the Renaissance, and around 1501 the Mantuan sculptor known as Antico made a small version for Isabella d'Este, the marchioness of Mantua.

The museum calls the work eclectic. It was probably made in the 1st century BC, joining a body based on Hellenistic models of the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC to a head derived from Greek works of the 5th century BC. Later the boy acquired a story of his own and the nickname Fedele, the faithful one. He was said to be a shepherd who carried an urgent message to the Senate and only then stopped to take the thorn from his foot. The tale was invented, and a book of engravings of ancient statues printed in Rome in 1704 already dismissed it.