Stand in front of the Bacchus statue for long enough, and he appears on the verge of speech. Though he never quite achieves it, curator Caroline Rocheleau doesn’t point at Bacchus as though he is an inanimate object. Rocheleau has looked after the statue through his most recent conservation undertaking at the North Carolina Museum of Art, a project that took seven-years.
In spite of this thorough investigation, Bacchus retains the enigmatic quality that has driven so many historians to obsess over him.
"There are still a few mysteries," Rocheleau said. "Hopefully scientists and curators and conservators of the future may be able to solve them."
Onlookers at the museum may not know that Bacchus has been dismembered and reassembled repeatedly — in his mythology, at the museum he now calls home, and over the course of his centuries-long life on Earth.
This is because Bacchus isn't one statue at all. He’s a composite: a single figure made up of pieces of other sculptures.
"A horror image of antiquity"
Bacchus’ head and torso are both Roman antiquities, but from different marble sources and possibly, different centuries. His limbs and embellishments, including locks of hair, leaves and berries, have various origins, from the Baroque period to 2019.
Bacchus’ tenure at the NCMA started in the 1950s.
In the 20th century, the dominating approach for composite statues was de-restoration, in which non-ancient additions or restorative elements are removed. The goal is to return a sculpture to its most authentic state.
"Composite statues, until fairly recently, were not acknowledged as genuine works of art, even though they had ancient components," Rocheleau said.
Bacchus received a strongly-worded letter about this in the 60s. He was displayed similarly to the way he is now, a mix of parts from different eras and locales. In the letter, an archeologist accuses him of being a “horror image of antiquity.”
![Bacchus was subject to quite a bit of gossip. An archeology professor living in Germany, Ernst Langlotz, suggested the North Carolina Museum of Art "free [Bacchus] from its modern restorations" so to preserve the authenticity of Bacchus' oldest fragments.](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/1ed366e/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1053x1185+0+0/resize/840x946!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F2f%2Ff6%2Faad2e08e4a3aa85b289c96d2ed49%2Fbacc.png)
The museum couldn’t immediately comply with the letter writer’s request because they lacked conservation facilities at the time. But by the 80s, Bacchus’ head and torso were shown separately, and the plaster reconstruction of his nose was removed.
Composite statues weren’t always horrific
According to Rocheleau, Bacchus has undergone restorative procedures since before 1620. In the 1700s and 1800s, when collectors wanted statues, they would hire sculptors to attach parts from wherever they could find them — often, dug-up fields in Italy. In family collections, people would switch out limbs and details to adapt to the styles of the time.
Geoarchelogist Scott Pike, an expert on chemical analysis of marble, said a statue’s coherence was less important during this period.
"When (sculptors) were restoring pieces, they were just grabbing loose marble left and right, whatever they had in the studio to piece together," he said. "The importance of a single piece of marble wasn't there, it was more the form and the shape."
But like the art historians of the 20th century, collectors were enamored with anything related to antiquity.
"Just knowing they had something that was ancient or partially ancient was of value back then," Pike said.
This is closer to how art historians think about composites now, according to Rocheleau.
"We see composite sculptures as part of a history, and an integral part of history," she said.
Chemistry can be revealing
Investigating the provenance of Bacchus’ parts required more than traditional historical research. Pike was introduced to the project to take an empirical approach.
A technique called mass spectrometry is used to measure the exact amounts of a particular chemical in a sample. It can also be used to measure isotope ratios. Because of variation in atmospheric carbon and oxygen, along with other factors, different marble sources will have different isotope ratio values.
Pike analyzed the ratios of samples from Bacchus to understand where each piece came from. These ratios, in combination with a few other clues, were telling.
"Marble looks like a mosaic. Different marbles will have different textures and that's usually not enough criteria to distinguish the marbles, but when you put it along with the stable isotopes, it can be very very helpful," he said.
In comparing Bacchus’ ratios with an existing marble isotope ratio database and making inferences from marble textures, Pike was able to figure out where each marble piece came from, down to the quarry.
Conservator Corey Riley led Bacchus’ conservation project. After reassembling Bacchus, she and Rocheleau still felt their work wasn’t done. In etchings of the statue from the museum in Italy that displayed Bacchus in the 1800s, he was depicted with both arms. But sometime last century, one got lost.
"We decided to put the statue back together again with a little extra special something, and that was the arm," Rocheleau said. The museum commissioned the Hillsborough artist Larry Heyda to recreate Bacchus’ original arm. He ended up modeling it after the NC State basketball player White Walker.
"It's just a connection to decades ago, millennia ago, and the same things were important, right? Someone was drawn to it then. I am drawn to it in my little closet while studying it," Riley said. "Touching and holding something that someone touched and held 2000 years ago, it’s just very special."
