Emperors good and bad, a handsome goat, fountains and friezes, seen for the first time in decades
Last month I went to Rome to see The Torlonia Marbles: Collecting Masterpieces at the Capitoline Museum. How could I not? It’s the biggest collection of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture in private hands. Unless invited by the Torlonia family, and I’m not on the family speed dial, no one’s seen it since 1976. In terms of numbers of sculpture, depth, breadth, and quality, the Torlonia Marbles are matched, and possibly outdone, only by the public collections of the Vatican and the Campidoglio, the state museum of Roman sculpture.
“After decades of silence and shadow,” the exhibition tells us, the Torlonia Marbles are finally on view. More than 90 sculptures, almost all Roman, are showing until June 29, after which the exhibition goes to the Louvre. Because of the Chinese coronavirus crisis, the Rome iteration was delayed, then opened, closed, reopened, closed again, and, finally, in late April, opened again.
It’s a show of consequence, and the catalogue is exceptional.
I’ll write one or two more stories about Collecting Masterpieces because the art’s so good, the collection so byzantine in its development, and the issues of connoisseurship and conservation so meaty. In terms of art, the cast of I, Claudius is there, from Augustus and Livia to Claudius, and so are at least 20 other emperors. There are full-length figures such as Hestia Giustiniani, so expressive of Roman reserve and probity. There are elaborate tomb sculptures, basins, and plinths in the show as well. The sculptures have been cleaned, and much restoration work has been done, so everything looks good.
Roman sculpture is famous for verisimilitude. This takes many forms. A face like Euthydemus of Bactria isn’t idealized, and the subject expresses no convention of handsomeness that I can conceive. It’s a face that blares tenacity as well as hard experience. Hair styles express a specific time. We don’t know what Caracalla looked like, but we do know his court produced an official likeness that’s distinct. His portrait bust scowls and frowns and looks away from the viewer in anger or impatience or surliness, not avoidance or disinterest. He’s a guy you want to avoid.
Statue of a Goat, from around a.d. 90 to 120, seems ready not to bleat but to quote Quintilian, whose down-to-earth rhetoric a goat as wise as this one looks would happily endorse.
Normally, I don’t like turning exhibition design over to architects, much less fancy architects like David Chipperfield. Curators know the objects best, and a good curator is the best educator. They’re the right people to arrange the art, and, in almost all instances, designers make a show, any show, into an experience of design, not the art. Chipperfield’s work, though, is sensitive and inspired. Yes, it has the look of Hollywood, but the sculpture is so good, it can take it.
“Decades of silence and shadows,” indeed. The collection, around 650 sculptures, was on view to the public in an old grain warehouse in Trastevere starting in 1875. Over the years, though, access tightened for many reasons, mostly cost and security, and the space closed during World War II. After the war, it reopened to invited guests only until 1976, when the warehouse — and this happens even in Rome — went condo and the art went away, into storage.
It’s a very Italian story, involving antiquities, excavations, an old, rich aristocratic family, no small measure of dithering and bickering, days turning into decades, and a majestic, operatic conclusion, except no one dies and it’s a happy ending. A survey of the collection and a well-done book on its history are now available. I think the family and the Italian government will make a deal on a permanent museum.
It’s an art-history show, loosely, and that’s fine. Collecting Masterpieces is an introduction to the Torlonia Marbles, with some of the best on display, but its core theme is how the collection coalesced. As Salvator Settis, one of the curators, tells us, it’s a “collection of collections” with provenance starting in Renaissance Rome.
The thing called “the Torlonia Marbles” is the vision and lifelong project of Prince Alessandro Torlonia (1800–1886). Alessandro built the Torlonia Marbles on the foundation of his father’s collecting. Giovanni Torlonia (1756–1829), the son of a drapery maker, grew immensely rich through a bank he founded that became the prime lender to both Pope Pius VI and the Italian branch of the Bonaparte family. A marquis as well as a duke, Giovanni was one of Rome’s biggest property owners, owning around 30 estates.
The Torlonia collection developed from land, both for the money it generated and for the easy access the family’s many properties provided for excavations. Collecting Masterpieces is an art show as well as an archeological study.
More precisely, and fortuitously, the collection started with Giovanni’s purchase of the studio of Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (1716–1799). He was not only one of Rome’s most renowned sculptors but Italy’s premier restorer of old sculpture. I’ll write about this next week, but buying Cavaceppi’s intact ancient sculpture, hundreds of bits of ancient sculpture, clay models, plaster casts, tools, and records was like getting the guys who did aesthetic dentistry and plastic surgery for MGM not only to talk but to show before-and-after photos.
Cavaceppi’s studio is an essential source for understanding how ancient sculpture was restored — not necessarily faked, I’ll add, but how much cunning and effort it took to take a smashed sculpture, part of which might be gone entirely, and make it both whole and appealing.
In 1857, Alessandro bought the collection assembled by Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani (1564–1637). Giustiniani was one of the earliest collectors of ancient Roman sculpture. He bequeathed it to his family, hoping his heirs would, at some point, open a museum. Alas, they spent his money instead. Their impoverishment finally collided with Alessandro’s wealth and acquisitiveness. Between Cavaceppi’s and Giustiniani’s objects, the Torlonia Marbles were off to a strong start. Giovanni Giustiniani had already started excavating new findings, but his son Alessandro dug not so much with frenzy but with single-mindedness and the eye of a connoisseur.
At that point, Alessandro point owned about 25 percent of the Argo Romanus, roughly the suburbs and rural outskirts of Rome as well as palaces throughout the city. He organized a massive excavation program on this land. One of Raphael’s last projects in the late 1510s and early 1520s was a vast, detailed map of Rome in the second century. By Alessandro’s time, scholars understood Rome’s layout street by street and which rural areas were once used for country villas.
Alessandro then did three things. Hiring sculpture scholars, he created an inventory of ancient sculpture owned by him and his family and housed in a dozen palaces, villas, and warehouses. He paid for the splendid 1885 catalogue of the collection. The Catalogue of the Torlonia Museum of Ancient Sculpture had a few versions, from modest to a splendid gargantuan that was one of the finest art books of its age. Finally, Alessandro was the founder, funder, and director of the Torlonia Museum, established in 1876.
The exhibition correctly and wisely starts by evoking the Torlonia Museum as it appeared in the 1870s. It’s an introduction with three highlights: the one full-length bronze sculpture depicting Germanicus; three busts, among them Euthedymus; and a packed but effective assembly of busts purported to be Roman emperors.
The emperors provide a historical timeline. Closely arranged against dark walls, they gleam and glower, some homely, but they don’t look lifelike. Anyone who knows anything about this gang wants them to stay mute and safely in the realm of the afterlife. It’s an impressive arrangement. Some may not be portrait busts of emperors, but all at one point were thought imperial material.
Together, they express a 19th-century museum aesthetic based on abundance — a “look at all the stuff we have” theme — but also proximity that promotes comparison and study. Today, arrangements in museums are open and airy. Even before the days of useless, unscientific, pulled-from-the-air social-distancing mandates, people seem to need space. They like art in small helpings.
But Collecting Masterpieces is for the doughty, not the easily overwhelmed or clinically hypochondriacal.
The next section is on the Torlonia excavations, starting with the villas explored in Giovanni’s time and then moving to Alessandro’s vaster operations, some in the city itself. The third section explores the Cavaceppi studio, the next the Giustiniani collection, and, finally, the earliest Renaissance collections, broken apart and sold over time but fodder for Alessandro’s collecting.
It’s no coincidence that Alessandro’s antiquarianism and the opening of the museum proceeded at the same time as the unification of Italy in 1870. The unification meant many things. Among them was the extinguishment of the pope’s temporal authority over Rome, Rome’s new role as the nation’s capital, with the civic pride that aroused, and a boom in the study of Italian history.
The real starting point of Collecting Masterpieces is what the exhibition calls “an absence, an emptiness” — the thousand years before the Renaissance when there was no collecting of antiquities in Rome. There was little understanding of them as art or artifact. Neglect was the best and often only preservationist. Yet ancient sculpture was everywhere, above ground and likely to be hit by any shovel put into the earth.
The return of the popes from the Avignon exile and subsequent schism in 1417 triggered a new pride among Romans since their city was now where the action was. To be Roman was good, but to be a Roman with lineage was better. References to “a reborn Rome” weren’t uncommon. For years, Romans had scavenged ancient sculpture like friezes, columns, caryatids, and plaques for architectural elements in new construction. Or, worse, they ground marble remnants into lime. Many of the city’s public fountains started as tombs with sculpted decoration. “What is our past?” soon elides into “what do we have from our past?”
In 1471, Pope Sixtus IV gave the ancient Roman bronzes long stored in the Lateran Palace, among them the Capitoline Wolf, to the Roman people for public display. It’s a gesture the catalogue calls unprecedented. The concept of works of art owned by the infinite agglomeration called “the people” — and people “from whose midst they arose,” as Sixtus said — given “in perpetuity,” led logically and emotionally to what we’d call a historic-preservation movement and a surge of antiquarianism.
Collecting Masterpieces empties into the exedra of the Capitoline Museum, where some of these bronzes are now displayed. It suggests a closing loop as we contemplate a future where the Torlonia Marbles, like these bronzes, are available for all to study and to enjoy.
