Muri statuette group

[2] At an unknown time, probably to protect them against some threat, the statues were removed from the temple, locked in a chest and brought to a nearby building in whose ruins they were found 1,500 years later, in May 1832.

From 1905 on, a drawing of Artio and the bear by Rudolf Münger was pictured on the title sheet of the journal of the Bernese historical society, Blätter für bernische Geschichte, Kunst und Altertumskunde.

[2] The matching style of the five main statues (Jupiter, Juno, Minerva , Naria and the human Artio) indicates that they were made by the same bronze caster, probably in the late second century AD somewhere in western Switzerland.

[2] The two figures of Artio are the most famous bronzes of Roman Switzerland, and the only known representation of a Gallo-Roman deity in both human and animal form.

The taut, muscular body and open mouth convey the great animal's tense attention, and the structure of her fur is realistically suggested by carefully engraved lines.

[7] At the time of their discovery, the individual elements of the group – pedestal, bear, woman, tree and basket – were separated from each other, making their configuration a matter of conjecture.

At some later time, the tree was moved to that protrusion behind the bear, making room for the newly added statue of the human Artio, her basket and her now missing throne.

This was probably done at the behest of the statue's sponsor, Licinia Sabinilla, and the pedestal also probably received its inscription at that time, because it is unlikely that the bear alone would have been titulated as Dea Artio.