A Stunning Collection of Rarely Seen Ancient Roman Sculptures Is Coming to North America for the First Time

One of the world’s finest private collections of Greco-Roman antiquities is owned by the Torlonias, a wealthy Italian family. It features 622 sculptures, including sarcophagi, statues of deities and marble busts of Roman emperors.

After being locked away for much of the 20th century, the collection toured Europe in a recent series of long-anticipated exhibitions. Now, a portion of the Torlonia Collection has come to North America for a three-city tour, marking the artworks’ first public display outside Europe.

The collection’s first stop is the Art Institute of Chicago. Titled “Myth and Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture From the Torlonia Collection,” the exhibition will feature 58 sculptures, according to a statement from the museum. All of the pieces are rarely seen, and 24 of them haven’t been displayed for nearly a century.

As co-curator Lisa Ayla Çakmak tells the New York Times’ Elisabetta Povoledo, the Chicago exhibition will “feel very different from the European presentations.” It’s “intended to be for non-specialists” who “might not know much about the ancient world” but may be interested in, for example, coming face-to-face with Marcus Aurelius, who was popularized by the Gladiator film franchise.

The Torlonia Collection’s works date to between the fifth century B.C.E. and the fourth century C.E. However, the majority of them were made during the Roman Imperial Period, which began in 27 B.C.E. with the reign of Augustus, the first Roman emperor, and ended with the western empire’s collapse in 476 C.E. One of the themes of “Myth and Marble” is imperial portraiture: works that depict Roman emperors and their family members, including a “remarkable selection of female portraits,” per the museum.

“This significant group of portraits allows us to highlight the critical role that imperial images played in visually reinforcing dynastic succession throughout the broader Roman Empire,” says co-curator Katharine A. Raff in the statement. “In particular, the portraits of women offer an important opportunity to examine the behind-the-scenes ‘soft’ power and influence held by many women of elite Roman families.”

The Torlonia family began their art collection at a public auction in the early 1800s, when they acquired the Italian sculptor Bartolomeo Cavaceppi’s collection of ancient marbles and terracotta and bronze statuettes, per the Torlonia Foundation. The family acquired its fortune beginning in the 18th century, when Giovanni Torlonia became the Vatican’s accountant and gained the titles of duke and count. In the following decades, the Torlonias “amassed great wealth through their commercial and banking activities,” as Çakmak and Raff write on the Chicago museum’s website.

The family continued acquiring art throughout the 19th century, eventually purchasing the sculpture-filled Villa Albani in 1866. A decade later, Prince Alessandro Torlonia established a private museum in Rome to display the collection. But it shuttered when World War II began, ending public access to the art for years to come.

As Carlotta Loverini Botta, director of the Torlonia Foundation, tells the Art Newspaper’s Gareth Harris, the foundation’s goal is to permanently reopen this museum. Officials are still looking for an appropriate venue in collaboration with the Italian government.

The luxury fashion brand Bulgari funded a recent restoration of many of the Torlonia Collection’s sculptures, including about two dozen works featured in “Myth and Marble.” One of these objects is a second-century C.E. funerary monument commissioned by the parents of a boy named Gaius Marcius Crescens. According to the inscription, Crescens died at the age of 14 years and nine hours. As the curators write, upper-class Romans often erected such monuments to their dead loved ones and visited them on birthdays and feast days.

Some sculptures in the Torlonia Collection are snapshots of historical restoration techniques that buck current standards. As the curators write, “While many 21st-century viewers are conditioned to appreciate the fragmentary state of ancient Roman sculpture, collectors in the 17th through 19th century favored complete works of art.” During those periods, artists often earned money by adding missing limbs and heads to ancient sculptures.

When the Torlonia exhibition leaves the Chicago museum, it will travel to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, before moving to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Canada. As Loverini Botta tells the Art Newspaper, “The museums [are] not only contributing to the expenses of mounting the exhibition but also enabling further studies and examinations of works in the collection, including detailed scans of certain sculptures that advance scholarship.”

The collection’s transatlantic trip has been a long time coming. “An international projection has always been central to us,” Alessandro Poma Murialdo, president of the Torlonia Foundation, tells the Times, adding that the artworks should inspire “visitors in as many countries as possible.”

“Myth and Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture From the Torlonia Collection” will be on view at the Art Institute of Chicago from March 15 to June 29.

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in Chicago.