Although the present piece is not signed, it is an entirely characteristic example of the work of Francesco Bertos, one of the most idiosyncratic and mysterious of all eighteenth century sculptors. Little is known of his career, beyond the fact that he is documented in Rome in 1693, was back in his native Venice around 1710, and in 1733 received a commission for two candlesticks for the Santo at Padua (Pope-Hennessy, locs. cit.).
Both in his bronzes and in his marbles, Bertos displays a taste for elaborately perforated forms, something that is apparent here both in the virtuosity of the ribbons trailing down onto Bacchus' shoulders and in the deliberately spindly treatment of the young satyr's legs. No less typical of Bertos is the angular cast of Bacchus' features, which is eminently comparable with the face of the bearded man in his Female Centaur attacked by male Figures in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Pope-Hennessy, op. cit., no. 711, fig. 700). The subject of the present group, which shows the god of wine with a young attendant, was a common one in antiquity, and was also popular in the renaissance, not least in the wake of Michelangelo's treatment of the theme, now in the Bargello in Florence.