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Ancient statues uncovered
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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Aboatman manoeuvres his tiny vessel alongside a towering cargo ship. In a the art the public sees can depend on politics and caprice (or, in some cases, crime). butcher’s shop bedecked with disembowelled 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 discovery: that the sleeping figure 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 statuary. In the 18th and 19th centuries the princely Torlonia family acquired well over 1,000 works. Some are considered essential to an understanding of Roman art.
Yet they have been almost entirely hidden from view since the second world war. Only now, with difficulty, are some being edged into the light: after decades of occasionally 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 “Salvator Mundi”, ascribed to Leonardo da Vinci, vanished after being sold for a worldrecord $450m in 2017. Johannes Vermeer’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 particularly 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 the museum. The prince and, until very recently, his descendants seem to have regarded the collection as personal property—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 impenetrable. Even a senior government official had to disguise himself as a workman to get a peek at such celebrated works as the “Girl from Vulci”, whose smile, as enigmatic 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 flats. The marbles continued to accumulate dust and grime for over 40 years, much to the frustration of art lovers.
At different times, government representatives offered to buy—and threatened to confiscate—the contents of the former museum from the head of the family, a descendant and namesake of the original Prince Alessandro. Things may have been further complicated by an inheritance battle in the Torlonia clan. Before the modernday 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 contents to the Getty Museum in America.
Still, in 2014 the marbles from the museum were entrusted to a foundation headed by one of the younger Torlonias. And the foundation concluded a deal with the cul
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