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Amy Snodgrass is addressing the questions that surround the decorative elements of the bronzes. A geologist by training, the associate conservation scientist worked in the division of applied sciences before starting at the Fogg museum. Today she is examining small samples of metal and corrosion products taken from the detailing on several statues. Ancient bronze workers often decorated headbands, eyes, and lips with silver. Snodgrass is trying to confirm its presence with a scanning electron microscope (SEM). A minute sample from the headband of a statue depicting Dionysos as a youth has been mounted on a disc, and Snodgrass uses a plunger to push the sample down a tube and into the SEM. On a black and white screen, she centers and focuses the image at a magnification of 5,000 times. In this sample, Snodgrass identifies a thin band that looks like silver. She centers this area in crosshairs on the monitor, then turns to another monitor that shows elements as patterns of peaks in a color graph. To Snodgrass, the peaks don't look like silver. Her reading shows tin and several other elements that make up bronze-uninterpretable data. She moves on to the next sample.

While the SEM's electron beam gathers information, Snodgrass names some of the technologies that will be used to study these bronzes. X-ray diffraction analysis (XRD), which determines the crystalline structure of materials, will be applied to core materials used in ancient castings. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), in which a sample for analysis is sliced thin enough that light can pass through it, will help identify organic materials used as adhesives for attaching decorative elements, such as silver in the eyes. Finally, explains Snodgrass, there is the x-ray fluorescence analysis (XRF) that she is performing now, which like EPMA can be used to indicate the presence and purity of metals.

Snodgrass turns back to the SEM, now finished gathering data. "Silver in the eye!" she exclaims. This is a different piece, a bronze head on loan from the Rhode Island School of Design, and the reading is very clear. Ten minutes later, she finds silver on a sample from the upper lip of the same head. While pleased to get a straightforward reading on this bronze, Snodgrass remains uncertain about the metal that decorates the eyes and headband of the Dionysos. Later analysis reveals that they are decorated with tin. This result surprises everybody. No one has ever heard of tin used in such a way on any other classical bronze. Mattusch doubts that this use of tin is unique, and scholars and scientists will now be looking for it. Many bronze statuary details formerly believed to be silver may well turn out to be tin.

Lie's extensive examination of the Dionysos yields several other surprises. The casting is extremely thin, yet all its major parts are intact. Thin castings use less bronze, but are fragile and technically challenging to execute. Molten bronze in thin castings cools more quickly and flows less easily. This means that certain parts emerge from the mold with holes and cracks that need to be patched. As one might expect, this bronze has been patched heavily-more than 100 times. Lie notes that while some of the repairs are modern, many of these simply replace ancient patches. He believes that "the foundry policy was to cast daringly thin bronzes with the expectation of having to make extensive repairs." Unfortunately, the quantity of lead used in the ancient repairs and modern restoration of the piece prevents even iridium-source radiography from clarifying the maze of aluminum and iron reinforcement rods, lead plates, and straps inside the statue.

Given permission by the owner to remove a large patch of bronze from the back of the statue, Lie uses an endoscope, a tiny camera mounted on a long snake-like probe attached to a video monitor, to examine the interior surface. "Except for restoration reinforcements, the interior surface of the torso is relatively clean, with a smooth green and blue patina," he reports. Regrettably, modern restoration material blocks access from the torso to the head and the legs. Notes Lie, "certain restoration techniques have the unintended consequence of preventing future technical studies."

He goes on to point out that "as now mounted, the statue is leaning too far forward. This could well be because when both edges of the break at the top of the left thigh were straightened out to effect a modern repair, the leg was shortened. As a consequence, the two parts do not exactly fit together and, though the lengths of the legs were equalized, it was the longer left leg that had given the statue an upright position."

But the restoration is not the only unorthodox aspect of this Dionysos. The right foot, of which the heel is raised, is flattened on the bottom like the weight-bearing left foot. There is no flex in the toes, and the sole was cast open-the usual practice for feet that were intended to rest on the ground. Yet Lie believes that the foot was part of the original fabrication. "The size, rendering, and patina of the right foot match the rest of the bronze," he says. "Perhaps there was no standard raised right foot in stock at the time of this commission, and so, for the sake of expediency, this foot was substituted." Curator Mattusch agrees that this "statue of Dionysos was not put together in the most felicitous way, but to meet a market demand."

As this kind of analysis suggests, she continues, "the technical study of classical bronzes, large or small, has always been a very separate field from their study as art or archaeology. But without technical studies, the field is stagnating in endless art historical arguments over iconography, date, style, and artist. We'll never know the answers to those kinds of questions." Through collaboration, she believes, art historians and conservators can advance the field.

The exhibition, which exemplifies this kind of collaborative effort, will coincide with the 13th International bronze congress (May 28-June 1), a periodic gathering of internationally prominent classical bronze scholars-archaeologists, conservators, art historians-who will be meeting in North America for the first time. "What I'm hoping," says Mattusch, "is that having a show of large bronzes with technical and art historical approaches mixed so that they are inextricable, one from the other, will educate people-not just the attendees of the Congress, many of whom are already doing scientific and technical studies-but the general public and those who are teaching the field."

Mattusch believes that a better understanding of ancient bronze-casting technology will lead to a broader appreciation for classical culture. "Cities of the classical world were filled with statues of public figures, the same way Washington, D.C., is adorned with our own heroes in bronze," she says. "And we've all seen pink plastic flamingos on American lawns. The classical bronzes in this exhibition were probably made for wealthy patrons of the arts, but the principle is the same," she says. "We have to educate ourselves that things don't change that much. The ancient Greeks did things the way we do. And they liked garden sculpture, too."

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