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Your galleryNude Youth in the Pose of the Spinario
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Follow the curve of the bowed back down to the hands, and look for the touches of white chalk that make the skin catch the light.
The Spinario, or Boy with Thorn, is a bronze of the 1st century BCE, one of the sculptures most admired and imitated in Rome, and Rubens knew it at first hand. Instead of copying the statue, he posed a living model in the same position. Rubens wrote that a painter must know ancient sculpture so thoroughly that the knowledge shows in everything he makes.
Black chalk, heightened with white chalk, on tan laid paper · 28 × 18.8 cm · Art Institute of Chicago · Baroque
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Nude Youth in the Pose of the Spinario
- Artist
- Peter Paul Rubens Flemish, 1577–1640
- Date
- 1610/16
- Medium
- Black chalk, heightened with white chalk, on tan laid paper
- Dimensions
- 28 × 18.8 cm (11 1/16 × 7 7/16 in.)
- Credit line
- Gift of Richard and Mary L. Gray
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.