Buried, ignored, misidentified, or broken into fragments and restored bit by bit
Today’s two most significant museum exhibitions, in aesthetic, scholarly, and historic terms, are The Torlonia Marbles: Collecting Masterpieces at the Capitoline Museum in Rome and Mythological Passions at the Prado, soon to be at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Both took years to plan and show exquisite art, one the best of ancient Roman sculpture and the other the best of Titian.
I wrote about the Torlonia show earlier this week and will write more in this story about the connoisseurship of Roman sculpture. An old Roman aristocratic family, the Torlonias own the finest collection of ancient Roman sculpture in private hands. The collection hasn’t been seen since 1976, so the exhibition of nearly 100 of the family’s 650 sculptures along with a sumptuous and important catalogue is, as it ought to be, a sensation.
The Prado and Gardner reunite the six big Titian “Poesies,” painted in the 1550s and 1560s for Philip II. Most are female nudes and are the apogee of that genre of luscious nude for which Venetians are renowned. These pictures haven’t been seen together for more than 450 years. They’re icons and attractions for the museums that own them, so getting them all together is an act of courage and perseverance. The exhibition at the Gardner is called “Titian: Women, Myth, and Power.” It opens in August and must be seen.
Both Collecting Masterpieces and the Titian show were hampered but not hobbled by the COVID lockdown catastrophe. Postponements and the open-and-shut-and-open control psychosis of COVID kooks kept us on the edge of our seats, wondering whether they’d actually happen. Art triumphs over adversity once more. I see that in itself as a cause for celebration, but these two exhibitions are extraordinary in themselves. There’s epic quality to be savored in both.
Collecting Masterpieces offers much to see and supreme connoisseurship. I focused earlier this week on the show as a history of collecting and museology. The Torlonia collection grew and evolved over a hundred years, first through Giovanni Torlonia’s purchase of the estate of the sculptor and, more significantly, art restorer Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, who died in 1799.
Giovanni, a self-made man, grew colossally rich as banker to the popes and the Bonapartes. He bought dozens of villas surrounding Rome and townhouses in the city and was the first in the family to sponsor excavations. His son, Alessandro, became richer still and made it his passion to acquire property he believed was antiquity-rich underground. Alessandro, who died in 1886, expanded the collection through purchases and digs, published it in a scholarly format, and created a vast gallery in Trastevere as Rome’s first private museum open to the public.
This history is in itself worth telling. It’s museum history but presented in Collecting Masterpieces as a marvel in itself. Art doesn’t get into a gallery by magic, especially art from ancient Rome that was either buried for centuries or in plain sight but ignored. Starting shortly before the death of Alessandro’s great-grandson, also named Alessandro, in 2017, the family has been working with the Italian government on the collection’s future.
In reading the catalogue and seeing the show, though, I learned the most about the intricate connoisseurship of ancient sculpture. The Torlonia Foundation has stewarded its art with notable attention to condition and scholarship. Roman portrait sculpture is very tricky.
Take the distinctive Euthydemus of Bactria, riveting because of his resolute, even hard expression and look not of rabble but of a real, tested character. His wrinkles and unusual hat, a hint of Buster Keaton or Wallace Beery, once suggested a peasant, servant, or fisherman to the cataloguers of the collection of Vincenzo Giustiniani, the 16th-century antiquarian and first modern owner whose art the Torlonia family acquired in the 1850s. The figure got a big promotion by then. He was thought to be, and still is by many, Euthydemus, the king of Bactria, now part of Afghanistan, from 230 to 200 b.c. So it’s not Roman but Greek, and from the period after Alexander the Great.
Coins tell part of the story since often that’s the only contemporary evidence we have. For classicists, “he looks like” coins depicting Euthydemus is sometimes the only evidence. Here, though, the curators of Collecting Masterpieces and at the Torlonia Foundation looked at his hat, which is a west Asian type but not one known to be worn by heads of dynasties.
There’s a bit of sculpted garment on the right side of his neck, suggesting that the bust had an elaborately clothed base. Ancient sculpture often survives in parts. At some point, the Torlonia Bust of a Drunken Satyr was a full-length, happy, stretched-out figure, judging from prototypes and the position of his shoulders and upper arms. He’s too soused to ask, “Where’s the rest of me?” But a “rest of him” there surely was.
Back to our new friend from Bactria. The surface is unpolished, and there’s some evidence of a stucco finish, which, the curators think, would have changed the proportions of hat-to-head, making the hat into the kind of helmet worn by Bactrian kings. There’s no royal insignia, though, and he doesn’t have a diadem around his headgear, whether hat or helmet, which a king would have had.
That wonderfully distinctive face, I learned, is itself a type from portrait sculpture from Alexander’s period. Given the absence of a diadem or insignia, the curators propose a leader who’s obdurate with a soupçon of callousness but not a king. He’s definitely not a servant. Why bother? So the best that can be said of the so-called Euthydemus is that it’s from around 200 b.c. given the hat, finish, and resemblance to figures on Bactrian coins, but the subject was a potentate, “a friend of the king but not a dynast.”
Sometimes, that’s all even the best scholars can do, and these are the best.
Often the hairdo is decisive. The Portrait of Agrippina the Elder seems certain to depict the wife of Germanicus and granddaughter of Augustus, since her soft, full curls arranged in rows appear so often in other sculptures of Agrippina done in the era of her son, Caligula. There’s a fine “Vespasian” type, with the figure characteristically bald, so it’s the absence not only of a hairdo but hair that’s evidence. This look, and the look of an old soldier, appears on countless coins from Vespasian’s rule. Sometimes, only the head of the bust portraits was discovered, with a modern base added, often in the 18th century. Most of the Torlonia works, though, like The Bust of Hadrian, are intact.
A special beauty and a show-stopper is a bust of a woman of high birth from the period of Caracalla, who ruled from a.d. 198 to 217, not only because of her voluminous hairstyle but because of the elaborate tunic and raised clenched hand. The sculpture is intact. Head and clothed bust have stayed together. During this period, the bust portion of portrait sculpture became fancier. Here, different thicknesses of fabric, rippling patterns, and some transparency show the highest production values, consistent with the style of the Severan age.
One of the exhibition’s many triumphs is the Bas-Relief with a View of the Portus Augusti, excavated in the 1850s on land bought by Alessandro Torlonia in present-day Porto, now near Rome’s big airport but once its early Imperial-era’s artificial harbor. Much of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture was originally painted and brightly so, and this bas-relief has traces of color discovered after it was cleaned.
Because the thing’s so detailed and so topographically correct, it’s now an essential guide in the study of Roman ships. The Port of Claudius’s famous lighthouse is there. The big ship entering the harbor has portrait likenesses of what is likely its owner and his wife. The god Neptune is there to receive thanks for the voyage’s success. The quadriga of elephants is a nice touch. At about four feet wide, it’s got a documentarian presence.
Lots of ancient Roman sculpture is based on Greek prototypes, though the Romans didn’t copy for the hell of it. The Hestia Giustiniani is a close copy of a Greek type from around 470 b.c., larger than life, probably from the early second century a.d. Hadrianic period when Rome had its Roaring Twenties days of prosperity and abandon. The severe Hestia type was a warning that such times always end and never end well. The Torlonia Hestia is the only intact version of the Greek original, which we know from fragments.
Rome was the first world empire, insofar as anyone knew the scope of the world, stretching from northern England to the Sahara and out to the edge of Persia. The Barbarini-Albani Nile is a personification of the Nile River from around a.d. 100. It’s in bigio morata marble, a dark stone flecked with white sometimes used in Roman art for African themes. Like many Roman sculptures, it was repurposed over its long history. When the Torlonias got it, it was a fountain in the garden at the Villa Albani.
This sculpture came to the Torlonia family when Giovanni Torlonia bought the Villa Albani and the studio of Bartolomeo Cavaceppi after he died in 1799. Cavaceppi was a sculptor but also the best restorer of ancient Roman sculpture. Bits and pieces were replaced by Cavaceppi, but in other objects Cavaceppi owned, such as the Vase with the Labors of Hercules, big parts of the figural decoration aren’t original. A Gorgon’s mask is from Cavaceppi’s time, expertly finishing a fragment of a mask from antiquity. An unrelated ancient base was attached to a mostly modern vase to create a single, integrated but very persuasive object.
Cavaceppi was hardly the only restorer fiddling with the sculptures. Gianlorenzo Bernini, the genius Baroque sculptor, did the restoration work on Statue of a Goat when he was a teenager working for his father. These were small restorations on the head, neck, tufts of hair, and the base, done with marble wedges.
The catalogue, co-published by Electa and the Torlonia Foundation, is stellar.
Salvatore Settis and Carlo Gasparri, the two main curators, edited it. First of all, it’s an in-depth study of Roman antiquarianism from the Renaissance, before which these sculptures were often mouldering, to Alessandro’s work to publish and display the art. There are 15 short, readable, rich essays covering such topics as the role of the Berninis, the first collections of ancient sculpture in the 16th and17th centuries, and how cutting-edge the Torlonia museum was when Alessandro established it in the 1870s. It’s good to remember that the concept of a museum emerged only 200 years ago. Museums such as the Prado and the Louvre were built from royal collections and opened to the public only after politics convulsed the kings in some way. That a family would make its art accessible was radical.
The book concludes with detailed entries on each object. These entries excel on restoration history and dating. The illustrations are well done, with lots of details. Some of the ladies’ hairstyles have to be seen in multiple views to be believed.
The Torlonia family wants an international tour and had one booked but, because of the COVID lockdowns, everything needs to be rescheduled. It will surely come to the United States at some point.
