Mandrel extractor

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"Capitoline Thorn Extractor" in the Conservators' Palace in Rome

The mandrel extractor ( Italian Spinario ) is an ancient motif of the fine arts , especially sculpture . It is a naked boy pulling a thorn from his left foot.

motive

The mandrel extractor sits on a boulder, his left leg bent over his right thigh. With his left hand he holds the instep of his left foot, with his right he pulls an invisible thorn out of the sole of his foot. The head is tilted over the foot. The hair is finely styled and falls in strands to both sides.

Executions

Castellani mandrel extractor in the British Museum , London .

The so-called " capitoline thorn extractor", the most famous version, is located in the Conservators' Palace in Rome . It is made of bronze and is 73 cm high without the plinth . It is probably one of the few ancient statues that were always visible above the ground. This is indicated by its detailed mention as simulacrum valde ridiculosum, quod priapum dicunt (“a highly ridiculous statue called Priap ”) in the manuscript De Mirabilibus Urbis Romae (“About miracles of the city of Rome”) by Magister Gregorius from the 12th century down. In 1471 the thorn extractor was bequeathed to the city of Rome by Pope Sixtus IV and, along with a number of other ancient bronze figures, was publicly exhibited on the Capitol. For a long time the "capitoline thorn extractor" was used for an original from the 5th century BC. Chr. And sometimes attributed to Lysippus , the court sculptor of Alexander the Great . Because the head of the thorn extractor was apparently taken over by a statue in an upright posture and the fall of the curls does not follow the inclined head posture, it was concluded that the "Capitoline thorn extractor" was a re-stylization in the style of classicism based on late Hellenistic models. The right arm was cast and attached separately.

A marble figure , called "Dornauszieher Castellani", excavated on the Esquiline in 1874 , is in the British Museum in London . It is 73 cm high and is a late Hellenistic Roman copy from the 1st century AD, based on a Greek original from the 3rd century BC. Was created. Two drill holes indicate that the "Castellani mandrel extractor" was once used as a fountain decoration. His right lower leg has broken off.

reception

Mythological interpretations saw Lokros , the son of Zeus and Maira (daughter of Proitus ) in the puller . In Greek mythology , Lokros is the ancestor of the Ozolian Lokrians , who, according to legend, injured his foot and subsequently recognized the fulfillment of a prophecy and became the founder of the city.

In the Middle Ages the thorn was seen as a symbol of original sin ; the thorn puller was interpreted as a sinner who had strayed from the right path. In this context, the motif was repeatedly used on capitals , facades, city gates and also on tombs.

Two naked youths by Luca Signorelli (Toledo Museum of Art)

At the beginning of the early Renaissance , the thorn extractor was resumed by Filippo Brunelleschi when he used it around 1402 as a model for a figure on the bronze doors during the renovation of the San Giovanni Baptistery in Florence . The painter Luca Signorelli used the thorn puller as a motif in the background of his depictions of Mary with the child in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and the baptism of Christ in the collegiate church of San Medardo in Arcevia as well as in the fragment of an altar middle section from Sant'Agostino in Siena .

Heinrich von Kleist mentions the thorn puller in his essay On Marionette Theater , which deals with the influence of human consciousness on natural grace. The narrator speaks of a young man whose education at the time had a wonderful grace. When a graceful, unconscious movement reminds him of the “young man […] pulling a splinter from his foot , he tries to repeat it consciously, but the attempt, as could easily have been foreseen, failed. Confused, he raised his foot to the third and fourth, he probably raised it ten more times: in vain! he was unable to bring about the same movement again [...] ”.

The “thorn puller” by Gustav Eberlein, Alte Nationalgalerie , Berlin .

Adolph Menzel made four sketches of the Spinario Castellani when it was exhibited in Berlin. Gustav Eberlein's marble statue from 1886 combines the thorn extractor with the Bacchus motif; it was awarded the Golden Medal and bought the following year by the Berlin National Gallery. In Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice , Gustav von Aschenbach compares Tadzio with the thorn puller. (Compare: "You had been careful not to put the scissors on your beautiful hair; as with a thorn extractor, it curled itself into the forehead, over the ears and deeper into the neck.")

In Heinrich Böll's story Wanderer, you come to Spa ... the thorn puller is listed alongside the Parthenon frieze as a classic prop of a humanistic grammar school . In Ferdinand von Schirach's story The Thorn from the Crime Collection , the museum guard Feldmayer loses his mind because he cannot answer the question of whether the boy found the thorn. The search in the foot remains unsuccessful, even with a magnifying glass. Feldmayer seems increasingly unclear whether the boy will get hold of the thorn at all, and if he does, whether he has perhaps already let it fall.

literature

  • Werner Fuchs : Der Dornauszieher (Opus Nobile 8), Dorn Verlag, Bremen 1958.
  • ders .: The sculpture of the Greeks , Hirmer, Munich 3rd ed. 1983. ISBN 3-7774-3460-4 . Pp. 284-287.

Web links

Commons : Dornauszieher  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Quoted from: Werner Fuchs: Der Dornauszieher. Opus Nobile 8, Dorn Verlag, Bremen 1958, p. 4
  2. Werner Fuchs: The sculpture of the Greeks , 1983, p. 286.
  3. Luca Signorelli e Roma. Exhibition catalog, Rome 2019.
  4. ^ About the Marionette Theater on Wikisource
  5. Eberlein, Dornauszieher Image Index of Art and Architecture, accessed on January 5, 2016.