Arts & Entertainment

Ancient Visitors to the Modern Wing: Art Institute Welcomes First Visit of Rare Roman Sculptures Collection

Last year an illustrious collection of sculpture visited the Louvre for the first time.

Now that medley of marble has taken its maiden voyage across the Atlantic Ocean and settled into the Art Institute of Chicago where, starting this weekend, the ancient works will hold court in the Modern Wing.

“We wanted to bring the past to the present,” co-curator Lisa Ayla Çakmak told WTTW News. “Placing these works in the Modern Wing can bridge the seeming disconnect between past and present and reinforce one of the key themes of the show: that the ancient Romans lived in a visually saturated world that resonates with us today.”

The exhibition aims to close the perceived gap between the ancient world and today’s world.

“Sometimes this material can feel really distant to people today,” Çakmak said.

“Like, why should I care about this stuff? But what the Romans were doing within the medium of sculpture was communicating messages about power, authority, identity, family, love, etc. Many of the same things we do with images today.”

The exhibition is called “Myth and Marble – Ancient Roman Sculpture from the Torlonia Collection.” The works span hundreds of years, with the earliest piece dating from the 5th century BCE.

Many of the nearly 60 marbles (and one notable bronze) have been out of view for decades. They depict emperors, gods and heroes of Greco-Roman myths, and they come from one of the largest private collections in the world.

The Torlonia Collection was gathered and cared for by the family of a 19th-century prince who was a banker to both the pope and the Bonaparte family. Some of the sculptures were excavated on the grounds of the family estates in Italy.

“Sculptures were everywhere in the Roman Empire,” said co-curator Katharine Raff.  “So much so that they’ve been described as Rome’s second population. In particular, sculptures filled the spaces of the public sphere — theaters, amphitheaters, temples, and so on. They were more than just decoration, as they often served a practical purpose in helping viewers understand the function of the particular space at hand. For example, statues of nude male athletes might adorn a gymnasium, while a statue of Venus (the Roman goddess of love), who was known for her birth in the sea, might be a fitting subject for a bath complex.”

Others came from cemeteries. The exhibition includes an enormous sarcophagus with intricate carvings that depict the labors of Hercules. One can’t help but marvel at the logistics involved in moving these heavy, fragile works across an ocean and into a museum.

The skill of the ancient artists is evident in folds of fabric and corkscrew curls of hair – all of it carved from stone. Some subjects are idealized. Others are realistic with wrinkles and crooked noses.

And they’ve all had work done.

Beyond recent cleaning and conservation, the marbles have been worked on over the centuries. In fact, restoring ancient works was once part of an artist’s training.

A prime example on display: 17^th century Italian sculptor Bernini recreated the head of a goat for a sculpture that had been decapitated centuries earlier.

Labels for each work of art include images that indicate what is original and what is restored – even if that restoration occurred hundreds of years ago.

“It’s important to be transparent with our visitors that when something is 2,000 years old, it doesn’t exist unchanged from the moment it was created,” explained Çakmak. “These objects have rich secondary and tertiary lives. By including images, visitors can quickly understand what is ancient, ancient but not original, and restored.”

The marbles from the Torlonia Collection begin their first-ever visit to North America in Chicago this weekend. They later visit the Kimball Art Museum in Texas and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts before heading back to their home.

“Like ancient Romans,” said Raff, “we are very attuned to reading and making meaning out of visual clues like clothing, hairstyles, facial features, and other elements of physical representation, all of which come together to convey any number of carefully crafted messages.”

“The big difference here of course is that while Roman media was analog, ours is primarily digital.”

“Myth and Marble – Ancient Roman Sculpture” from the Torlonia Collection opens to the public March 15 and runs through June 29.

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Marc Vitali is the JCS Fund of the DuPage Foundation Arts Correspondent.

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