Bacchus

Putting Bacchus back together was a slow process. All fragments were cleaned with erasers, gels, or lasers to make the statue more uniform. Open joins were filled and toned to make them visually distinguishable from the marble. This allowed for identification of the various fragments without the joins being distracting. Sampling holes were filled, and marble patches put back in place. Then came the heavy lifting.

Berries and leaves were reattached to the head. A potted pin, permanently attached to the head from a hole in the bottom of the neck, allowed the head to be lifted and secured to the body. Bacchus spent two months with his head in a sling while the adhesive between the head and torso cured. The mullet was reattached, with epoxy putty fragments created to fill the gaps between stone elements. Bacchus’s side locks were installed when the harness was removed. The new right arm went on last, with artist Lawrence Heyda giving the tinted polyurethane a marbled look. Now the statue looks the way it did back at the Palazzo Altemps in 1837!

The 1837 drawing of Bacchus kept popping into our minds as we developed the new conservation treatment, the reassembly of Bacchus. What if we gave the statue a new right arm holding grapes, like the drawing (and the 1945 photo we found)? We decided to re-create Bacchus’s arm—on condition the process was reversible and would not damage the sculpture.

The musculature of Bacchus’s limbs creates an aesthetically pleasing composition. It was important that new right arm looked natural and fit well with the rest of the sculpture. Artist Lawrence Heyda, who is a specialist of the human form and has an engineering background, worked with a basketball player to create a limb. Discussions with the project curator, conservator, and engineer ensured that the position of the arm is anatomically correct, historically accurate, and designed to prevent torque and undue forces on the sculpture.

The arm was 3-D printed in three sections—upper arm, lower arm, and hand—and then joined together with fiberglass putty. Artist Lawrence Heyda then re-sculpted the hand and grapes and made extensive changes to the lower arm so that it would merge seamlessly with Bacchus’s torso.

Curious to learn more about how this project was documented and recorded? Watch the video below to learn more about video production at the NCMA.

What characteristics do geologists look for?

Color. Marble is not always white; it can be pink, green, or even black. During the metamorphic process, when limestone recrystallizes into calcite, impurities can be incorporated into the calcite and change the overall color of the marble. The tree trunk and the base of the statue, made of marble from Mount Hymettos, have a faint blue-gray color.

Inclusions. Sometimes other minerals get mixed in; these inclusions are specific to a quarry or region. Pyrite (fool’s gold) is a telltale sign of Pentelic marble. Bacchus has a speck of pyrite on his right leg and his left arm, both carved of marble from Mount Pentelikon.

Veins. Veins of color can also be seen in some marbles (caused by impurities present as grains in the original lime- stone). The marble varieties used to create Bacchus do not have veins. The orange-brown stains you see on the right leg and left arm are the result of the oxidation (rusting) of the iron present in the Pentelic marble over the centuries.

Grain Size. Some varieties of marble have fine grains that are nearly impossible to see, while others have rather coarse grains (a grain is a bunch of crystals, and its size depends on temperature during the metamorphic process). Bacchus’s head is carved from a coarse-grained marble quarried on the Greek island of Thasos.

Only four other statues that feature the same torso type as the NCMA’s are found in Italy and England. Two have their original heads preserved (Rome, Liverpool); both are ancient portraits of young men. The other statues were restored to create something new.

Scientific analysis was conducted to determine the quarry source for each marble. Each marble variety has different characteristics that help us differentiate the fragments. Below are the locations of the fragments.

1. Marble from Carrara, Italy; Carrara region has several Quarries
2. Marble from the Greek island of Thasos
3. Marble from Anatolia, Turkey; The quarry at either Ephesus or Afyon
4. Marble from Mount Pentelikon, Northeast of Athens, Greece
5. Marble from the Greek Island of Paros
6. Marble from Mount Hymettos, Southeast of Athens, Greece

Understanding where the Statue of Bacchus came from gives it cultural and historical context, and thus meaning. Knowing who owned, sold, or bought the statue enriches the story significantly (ownership history is called provenance). When the sculpture was given to the NCMA by John Humber, we knew it had been purchased during the sale of Brummer collection and that its previous owner was J. P. Morgan (Morgan bought it in 1911).

We traced Bacchus’s provenance even further, to the Palazzo Altemps in Rome. We found documents that helped us figure out when the right arm went missing. Archival research is just as important as the study of the work of art itself. Such research is difficult because not all works of art are well documented. Finding documents related to the statue and mentions in publications helped us write its story.

Sometimes it is necessary to take samples of the materials that make up a work of art to truly understand it and its history. Samples of marble, metal, fill materials, and surface coatings can be taken by drilling, chipping, scraping, or swabbing. Identifying the marble source quarry (where the marble came from) can help determine whether fragments belong together (very important in our case), where a statue might have come from, and, along with other analyses and observations, whether a sculpture is genuine. On top of that, we needed to figure out what kind of materials—like adhesives—were used to join these fragments. Along with art historical knowledge, this information could help us understand how Bacchus was put together and subsequently repaired, and maybe give us an idea of when this happened. Sampling is a destructive process, so we had to be judicious when taking tiny bits of Bacchus to send to scientists for study.

Due to structural integrity issues, the removal of the torso and the proposed re-creation were not feasible. Wishing to keep the postantique fragments, we had to come up with a new plan. We asked ourselves:

1. The torso would be a great example of 2nd-century Roman Imperial sculpture if displayed separately. Would it make sense to display the other fragments individually as well? No. Modern aesthetics imposed on antiquities make us appreciate a nude torso. (It’s sexy.) Fragments are meaningless displayed separately.
2. Bacchus is a patchwork of fragments, some ancient and others refurbished in later years. Are composite sculptures important to art history? Yes. In 16th-century Rome, composites made using antiquities and other fragments were prized as much as marble sculptures made at that time. Later refurbishment of composites is an important insight into the history of restoration.
3. If a derestoration is not feasible, how about a rerestoration? Are there precedents for disassembled statues being put back together again? Yes. The Getty Villa in Malibu, California, a museum leader in ancient marble sculpture conservation, has put statues back together after they had been taken apart in the 1960s and 1970s.

It was decided to put Bacchus back together.

Examining the surface of a work of art does not give all the information one needs to understand how it was made. It is possible to look inside a large marble sculpture, but x-rays are typically ineffective; the marble is too dense to see through.

Gamma rays, however, are strong enough to do so. (Gamma radiography has an industrial use, not a medical one.) Bacchus is made of different fragments, and it was important to understand how they held together and determine whether the statue could withstand the proposed conservation treatment. Images of the various metal rods, pins, and staples inside Bacchus were shared with the project engineer, along with the 3-D scan data, for structural analysis.

How stable is Bacchus as the statue stands now? If the torso is removed to be displayed separately, could we use the historical limbs and replicas of the ancient fragments to create a new version of Bacchus (our original plan)? What would happen if we added things to the body?

The study of any work of art starts with a visual examination, which is conducted with one’s own eyes in natural, raking, and ultraviolet (UV) light because not everything is visible with the naked eye. Raking light (unidirectional illumination of a surface at an oblique angle) reveals surface damage as well as marks made by the tools the sculptor used. Examining toolmarks enables experts to determine when the work might have been carved because different tools and techniques were used at different periods. UV light (also known as black light) shows previous restorations with various materials glowing in different colors. Newer conservation materials often appear dark purple, while older restorations can fluoresce bright yellow. (Both appeared on Bacchus.) These details were recorded as the sculpture was examined and documented. Our documentation also included a 3-D structured light scan of all the individual fragments, large or small. The 3-D scan data was a tool to help with other studies and interpretation.

Conservation is an umbrella term for the preservation, examination, documentation, and then restoration of works of art, whether a painting, sculpture, or other type of art. Conservators are trained in science, art history, and studio art. Conservators rely on the combination of these fields to determine the best course of action to treat a specific artifact. They must understand the physical materials of the artwork, comprehend and honor the cultural and art historical importance of the object, and have the hand skills to safely treat the artifact. When hearing the term museum conservation, most people think only of restoration, or the physical repair of cultural heritage, but many steps in research and scientific analysis must be conducted before the artwork undergoes treatment or physical alteration. During the Bacchus Conservation Project, all four of these branches of conservation were applied to the Statue of Bacchus. Our research allowed us to determine that the original idea (derestoration—taking the statue apart) was perhaps not the best solution, and it helped us form an alternative plan to achieve our goal: the meaningful display of Bacchus.

Want to know more about conservation? Explore the NCMA’s conservation lab with our 360-degree video here.

The cult of Dionysos/Bacchus had a mysterious component, typically performed in nature away from prying eyes. The Bacchus mysteries, or Bacchanal, involved a ritual with frenzied dancing, loud singing, and drinking resulting in the participants’ state of ecstasy, liberating their souls to commune with Bacchus. This aspect of the cult was popular with disenfranchised members of society—women, immigrants, and slaves—because it offered them a chance to temporarily forget about their plight. Bacchus is thus the god of ritual madness as well. Statues of Bacchus holding grapes and a cup, often in an outdoor setting created by the presence of a tree, were popular from the Renaissance onward, regardless of having been created from a variety of fragments or newly sculpted from a block of marble.

The Bacchus Conservation Project was established in 2013 to study the Statue of Bacchus, understand how it was put together, trace its history, and complete the derestoration (taking the statue apart) that was begun decades ago. Scholarly interest in the NCMA’s Bacchus arose in the 1960s when classical art experts identified it as a patchwork, a statue made from various fragments. At the core of this composite was a rare 2nd-century Roman torso, in a strong and elegant pose with its missing right arm raised. There are only four others of this type dated to the Roman Imperial Period, three in Italian museums and one in England. (Ours is the only one outside of Europe.) Originally, these torsos may have been part of portrait statues of young men hunting.

This exhibition shows how science and technology were used to uncover the history of a work of art, inform a change to our original conservation treatment, and help us tell the statue’s fascinating story.