Height 27 cm, marble base diameter 15.7 cm (height 8.3 cm), weight 4.600 kg, from the late 1800s/early 1900s. Good condition, insured shipping. The Spinario is a Hellenistic sculpture, depicting a young man sitting while, with his legs overlapping, he leans out to the side to remove a thorn from the sole of his left foot. There are various versions exhibited in museums around the world. Perhaps the oldest version, in bronze (73 cm high), can be found in the Capitoline Museums in Rome, while a marble statue is part of the collection of the Uffizi in Florence and was copied by Brunelleschi in the famous tile of the competition for the north door of the Baptistery in 1401. Another marble copy is in the Louvre, a bronze copy in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. During the Renaissance, it was one of the most admired and copied ancient statues. It was at that time the legend of the shepherd boy of Vitorchiano, Gnaeus Martius, was probably born. He ran from Vitorchiano (VT) to Rome to warn of the arrival of the Etruscan invaders and hurried, ignoring the thorn that had entered his foot, and stopping to extract it only after the mission had been completed. In 1798 Napoleon seized the statue and sent it to his museum in Paris (now the Louvre), where it remained until 1815.