Today Crouching Boy is to be found in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, the only work by Michelangelo in the Museum’s collection. It is a small, unfinished, piece, sculpted in marble, measuring only 22 ins. (54 cm.) and shows a boy, naked and crouching down, perhaps to tend his injured foot. The boy’s body is well developed, with prominent musculature, and his crouching figure strongly suggests the inner strength compressed within him.
The boy’s head is turned down as he concentrates on his foot, oblivious to all that is going on around him, and contributes to the sense of sorrow and pain that the piece evokes.
Yet the work remains enigmatic. Some scholars have seen the piece as a representation of the unborn soul, others as a wounded soldier. Still others interpret the “Crouching Boy” as the personification of Genius or of the suffering of mourning.