if you have a larger calibration panel you can do it in one, you would have less resolution than splitting into 3 sections but easer to align done in one view,
as Narmella said most important to have a good accurate calibration corner
ball bearing painted white is good yes but if your statue has lots of detail you may not need anything

I did these two separately on turntable 16 scans plus top scan and only needed free alignment to get very good results as they have enough details for David to work with
if you did the full statue then repeated in 3 sections for more detail and aligned to full scan for good alignment then removed full low res scan you should get good detail and good alignment but would take more time, but you wouldn't have to remove the balls and rescan to fix the holes left by them,
I would say try with turntable set to 22.5° you get a good overlap of the scans and I've found it easy to align lots of low detail things this way without use of balls etc but its easy to add some if you have a hard time with an object
p.s on a 2 foot tall object I would use some bigger balls than 4 mm some 12mm balls round the base and in low detail arias is probably best,