Art Institute showcases ancient Roman sculptures in unprecedented 'Myth and Marble' exhibit
Any temporary exhibition of ancient Roman sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago would be notable, because 44 years have passed since the museum’s last such offering — an astoundingly long absence.
But the museum’s just-opened show in this realm, “Myth and Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture from the Torlonia Collection,” deserves particular attention because of the sheer beauty and quality of the nearly 60 works on view.
Co-organized by the Art Institute and Rome-based Torlonia Foundation, it is the first time works from the private holding are being shown in North America. The show, which runs through June 29, will subsequently tour to the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and the Montreal (Quebec) Museum of Fine Arts.
Most of the selections are marble portraits of emperors and officials and depictions of gods and goddesses, but there are also reliefs, animal sculptures and funerary monuments. Though bronze works were prevalent in ancient Rome, few have survived, because the alloy was easily melted down and used for other purposes. Included in the show is the collection’s lone surviving bronze: “Statue of Germanicus,” 1st century.
“Myth and Marble” spotlights several large-scale works, including “Strigilated Sarcophagus with Lions,” about 260-270. This massive 57½-by-104¾-inch stone coffin, which weighs some 9,000 pounds, is a reminder of the extraordinary logistics that went into transporting and installing these objects.
“These are some of the largest sculpted works coming out the Roman world and these are things that we don’t see in U.S. museums. You have to go to Italy to see objects like this, and, so, it’s really exciting,” said Katharine A. Raff. The Art Institute curator of the arts of Greece, Rome and Byzantium oversaw the exhibition with fellow curator, Lisa Ayla Çakmak, who also chairs the department.
The notion of a Roman sculpture show might seem at first blush to be a bit stodgy or passé, but visitors who give this exhibition a try are likely to be surprised by the artistic audacity of this work and how fresh and compelling it seems two millennia after its creation.
All but three of the Torlonia sculptures are displayed in three first-floor galleries in the Modern Wing, which was a deliberate choice of the curators to try bring the past very much into the present.
“What we wanted to do,” Çakmak said, “was help people build this bridge to the ancient past about images. We’re surrounded by media. The ancient Romans were surrounded by media. It’s just that our media today tends to be digital, and in the ancient Roman world, sculpture was the medium par excellence.”
Unlike the Beaux-Arts spaces where Greek and Roman art is displayed, say, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, these spaces are clean and spare with a subtle interplay of whites and grays. “We wanted to upend expectations and make it feel fresh and contemporary,” Çakmak said.
Among the most memorable aspects of the display is a kind of gallery of emperors, in which a commanding 64½-inch-tall seated statue of the emperor Augustus, strikingly surrounded on three sides by 18 sculptures (all but one busts on pedestals) of Rome’s imperial leaders and their family members.
Outside of specialists in the field, most people until now have known little of the Torlonia Collection, though Çakmak ranks the holding alongside those of the vaunted Capitoline Museums in Rome and Vatican Museums. “It’s that good,” she said.
The collection, which has been overseen by successive members of the Torlonia family since the beginning of the 19th century, was assembled through purchases of other major collections and individual works and excavations on the family’s extensive land holdings in and around Rome.
In all, it contains more 600 sculptures dating from the 5th century BCE to the second half of the 4th century, including many imperial portraits from the 2nd-century height of the Roman Empire, the western portion of which ended in 476.
As would be expected for sculptures that are hundreds of years old, few such works have been unearthed intact, and modern viewers are used to seeing them displayed in museums as fragments, with heads, limbs and other sections missing.
But, stunningly and unexpected, virtually all of the selections on view in this exhibition are complete. They have been fully and seamlessly restored, and in many cases there are more modern parts of these sculptures than old.
It should be noted that many of these restorations date as far back as the 16th century, following practices of the time. And in some cases, famous sculptors added sections, as is the case with “Statue of a Resting Goat,” which has a head that is believed to have been crafted by famed Italian sculpor Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680).
To assure full transparency and make sure viewers are in no way misled, there is a diagram on the label for each of the selections that maps which sections of the work are original and which were added later.
“Objects live these rich secondary and tertiary lives, and that’s OK,” Raff said. “It’s part of their story, and that’s why it was important to us to include the diagrams.”
According to the show's catalog, the best-known work in the Torlonia Collection is a 13 1/2-inch-tall bust, titled “Portrait of a Young Woman, known as the Maiden of Vulci," mid-1st century BCE. It is striking for the penetrating realism of this young woman who gazes slightly upward and to the right.
More highlights from the exhibit:
— “Portrait of a Man, known as the Old Man of Otricoli,” mid-1st century BCE, 30¾ inches tall. There is no idealization here. All the many wrinkles of this old man are clearly articulated, giving this piece a palpable sense of realism and humanity. This work is included in many art-historical texts as one of the key works of this period.
— “Statue of a Goddess, known as Hestia Giustiniani,” first half of 2nd century, 78¾ inches tall. The latter name in the title refers to the 17th-century collection to which this work once belonged. A copy of a then-500-year-old Greek sculpture, the modeling of this unusually intact work is more plain and sedate than more ornate styles common in Roman sculpture at the time.
— “Portus Relief,” late 2nd-early 3rd century, 29⅛ × 48½ inches. This fascinating 6-inch-deep relief intermixes detailed scenes of Portus, the primary port of imperial Rome, with an array of mythological and symbolic imagery, including a large eye that was believed to ward off evil. It is a packed yet ordered composition complete with its own integrated carved frame.
Note: In a timely confluence of events, Wrightwood 659, an exhibition space at 659 W. Wrightwood Ave. recently placed a standing Roman sculpture of the Greek goddess, Athena, from the early 1st century on permanent view. This significant work was acquired in 2023 by the Chicago-based Halsted A&A Foundation from a British family that owned it for more than two centuries.