A Rarely Seen Collection of Roman Marbles Is U.S.-Bound for a Major Museum Show

Five years ago, almost no living people had ever laid eyes on the storied Torlonia Marbles—the most important collection of ancient Roman sculpture in private hands. Now, a selection from the 620-piece trove is preparing for its first-ever traveling show. “Myth and Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture from the Torlonia Collection” will touch down at the Art Institute of Chicago in May, then open at Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum in September. Its sojourn will conclude at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in July 2026.

The exhibition will mark the first time that many of these relics have left Rome, let alone set out for America. It will also mark the first showcase of ancient Roman sculpture at the Kimbell in the museum’s 52-year history, and the first time the Art Institute of Chicago will show such work in its modern wing.

The sprawling collection takes its name from the Torlonia family, who got rich handling the Vatican’s finances during the 18th and 19th centuries and bought many of its specimens from other Italian aristocrats who were facing financial hardships. In 1876, Prince Alessandro Torlonia created a museum to house the collection, which hosted small groups until the start of World War II, when the works went into storage. They didn’t re-emerge until 2020, when they went on show in Rome. Since then, one of the family’s Venuses joined the Basquiat exhibition at Gagosian’s Los Angeles gallery earlier this year, and a wider selection of Torlonia marbles is currently on view at the Louvre.

Lisa Ayla Çakmak, the Art Institute of Chicago’s Chair and Curator of Arts Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, and Katharine A. Raff, a curator in the same department, have planned an entirely new spectacle using the Torlonia collection. They’ve chosen 58 sculptures spanning nine centuries for “Myth and Marble,” 24 of which have been newly restored through the collection’s ongoing partnership with Bvlgari.

Their take will play out over six thematic sections, starting with some of the collection’s most famous holdings. “The primary thesis of the exhibition is about how both in antiquity and today we live in a world surrounded by images and those images communicate messages about identity, status, power, etc.,” Çakmak told me over email.

“Where we really focused our efforts was in the areas of portraiture and gods and goddesses,” she continued. “We wanted to highlight the emperors of the 2nd century C.E. because there is significant name recognition here, such as Marcus Aurelius.”

“The Torlonia Collection also has a good number of female portraits from the same time period,” Çakmak added, “so it gave us the opportunity to highlight the role of imperial women in the dynastic structures of the period.” Most Roman women of this era were relegated to the roles of wives and mothers, but exceptions abound—like Livia Drusilla, Rome’s first empress, and Julia Domna, who mediated the co-emperorship of her two sons 200 years later.

In terms of ancient deities, Çakmak feels especially fond of a newly restored statue of Athena holding an owl in her outstretched hand. (Works restored previously, like an imperial-era goat that Gian Lorenzo Bernini attended to during the 17th century, will also appear.) Raff, meanwhile, is partial to the , since it’s “stylistically quite different from most Roman depictions of the goddess of the hunt.”

Funerary relics like the collection’s oldest piece, (ca. 5th century B.C.E.) prove a strong point of the collection. Most ancient Roman graves were dug on the outskirts of the city for health reasons—in areas the Torlonias bought up en masse throughout the 19th century, alongside their land in Porto, Italy. These mesmerizing adornments promise to help bring this ancient era to life for an entirely new audience.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com