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Culture
The Economist July 9th 2022
Art and aristocracy
Hearts of stone MILAN
The Torlonia Marbles, a unique collection of classical statuary, have been hidden from public view for decades. Until now
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boatman manoeuvres his tiny vessel alongside a towering cargo ship. In a butcher’s shop bedecked with disembow elled animals, an incongruously elegant lady sits at the counter, yanking a dead goose towards her by the neck. Elsewhere, two impish characters marvel at their dis covery: that the sleeping fi gure beneath a sheet they have lifted is a hermaphrodite. The people in these scenes lived—if they lived at all—around 2,000 years ago. But they have survived, trapped in marble, alongside Roman emperors and the heroes and deities of mythology in the world’s largest private collection of classical statu ary. In the 18th and 19th centuries the prin cely Torlonia family acquired well over 1,000 works. Some are considered essen tial to an understanding of Roman art. Yet they have been almost entirely hid den from view since the second world war. Only now, with diffi culty, are some being edged into the light: after decades of occa sionally rancorous negotiation between the family and the Italian state, 96 marbles and a bronze are on display in Milan. The story of the Torlonia Marbles shows how
the art the public sees can depend on poli tics and caprice (or, in some cases, crime). “Salvator Mundi”, ascribed to Leonardo da Vinci, vanished after being sold for a worldrecord $450m in 2017. Johannes Ver meer’s “The Concert”, valued at $250m, has not been seen since it was stolen from a museum in Boston in 1990. The Torlonia Marbles were never partic ularly accessible. In 1875 Prince Alessandro Torlonia created a museum that came to host 620 pieces (several hundred others have remained ever since at Villa Albani, the family’s residence in Rome, where they can be viewed by appointment). But even illustrious travellers struggled to get into → Also in this section
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the museum. The prince and, until very recently, his descendants seem to have regarded the collection as personal proper ty—a stance that outraged critics and connoisseurs who saw it as part of Italy’s cultural heritage. The museum closed during the second world war and became even more impene trable. Even a senior government offi cial had to disguise himself as a workman to get a peek at such celebrated works as the “Girl from Vulci”, whose smile, as enigmat ic as the Mona Lisa’s, was known almost entirely from photographs. In 1976 the busts, statues and sarcophaguses were moved into storage so the building could be split into fl ats. The marbles continued to accumulate dust and grime for over 40 years, much to the frustration of art lovers. At diff erent times, government repre sentatives off ered to buy—and threatened to confi scate—the contents of the former museum from the head of the family, a de scendant and namesake of the original Prince Alessandro. Things may have been further complicated by an inheritance bat tle in the Torlonia clan. Before the modern day Alessandro died in 2017, he was sued by his oldest son, Carlo, who has since brought a suit against his siblings. He has claimed, and they have denied, that they tried selling the former museum’s con tents to the Getty Museum in America. Still, in 2014 the marbles from the mu seum were entrusted to a foundation head ed by one of the younger Torlonias. And the foundation concluded a deal with the cul
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