the person responsible for the final look of the entire reconstuction and illustration from it is the one who who invested it with "the spark of life," since, yes, you can't get that from a skull.

This artist chose to take the basic provided base (bone structure and muscles) and give Bach a bewildered, all-at-sea, slightly 'pained by life' and yes to use Ockham's phrase the puzzled "dumb white guy" expression. That was totally a choice of the artist; it did NOT come from the skull. His expression reminds me of Paul Dooley's character in "Sixteen Candles."  The confused dad at the mercy of events.

And speaking for myself only, not Ockham, THAT is the objection. Would the composer of the St. Mathew Passion, The Brandenburg Concertos, The Well Tempered Clavichord and thousands of other majestic compositions have likely had a stupid look on his face?

It would be a passing piece of idiocy, but this thing is going to be put in a museum where young people will see it and now have impressed in their memory forever that Bach looked like a silly nobody.

Would a silly nobody have written this?
http://www.rozhlas.cz/d-dur/download/10_track.mp3
or this:
http://www.rozhlas.cz/d-dur/download/13_track.mp3

What Post-modernists do as second nature is to deconstruct the face of a giant and replace it with that of a dolt. They don't like us to see 'majestic' and 'exhaulted' and 'intensely, seriously devoted to a vision." They don't want us to valorize heros.

::::: Opera :::::

Note: the above track is from a site generously posting the entire Brandenburg Concertos played on period instruments. If you want to know the giant who was J.S. Bach, I suggest you go here:
http://www.rozhlas.cz/d-dur/download_eng