More than 5,000 miles stretch between Italy’s Eternal City and Texas’ Cowtown. Despite this geographical distance, the two metropolises will be sharing treasures with the unveiling of a new and unprecedented exhibition at Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum.
Starting Sept. 14, the venerable Louis Kahn-designed institution welcomes Myth & Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture from the Torlonia Collection, featuring 58 pieces from what is considered one of the largest and most important private collections of ancient art in the world.
In the 18th and 19th century, Prince Giovanni Torlonia, a humble merchant turned princely landowner and financier to the Vatican, together with his son Prince Alessandro, amassed an art collection comprising more than 600 pieces of classical antiquities, from busts and funerary monuments to Greco-Roman statues, all excavated from the Torlonia family’s private estates or acquired from Rome’s most prominent patrician families.
Beginning in 1876, scholars and select visitors were given access to the collection at the Museo Torlonia in Rome, until it shuttered in the wake of World War II. Unseen for generations, select masterpieces went on display at The Louvre in Paris in 2024, ahead of the announcement of the collection’s debut North American tour.
Now, as the family’s collection crosses the Atlantic for the first time, the Kimbell Art Museum becomes the second of three stops to showcase Myth & Marble, bookended by The Art Institute of Chicago and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
For Texans, viewing on their own turf selected highlights from the world-renowned collection, including 24 works restored especially for this tour, is a rare treat. “When you think about what it took to get these pieces from Rome to Chicago, and then Chicago to the Kimbell, it’s a monumental task—and a lot of moving parts,” says museum curator Jennifer Casler Price. There are priceless relief carvings and emperor portraits, large-scale figures of gods and goddesses, and 6,000-pound sarcophagi ranging in date from the fifth century BC to the fourth century AD. “The utmost care has to be taken with packing, shipping, and transport.”
Logistically, this includes everything from meticulous crating to cargo aviation, and delicate delivery to the museum, whereupon a team of couriers, conservators, and directors receives each piece and oversees its scrupulous security and regimented installation.
“Needless to say, it is a tremendous honor for the Kimbell to have been selected,” says Director Eric M. Lee of the Kimbell.
Myth & Marble is also the venue’s first exhibition dedicated entirely to Roman sculpture, and for Lee and his team, it’s a milestone rife with educational opportunities. “One thing a lot of people don’t realize is that pretty much all of these sculptures were painted originally,” Casler Price explains. “We always think of dazzling white marble sculptures, but most of them were likely polychromed in antiquity, and probably gilded, too, in some cases.”
Also lesser known is the extent of restorations these sculptures endured over the ages. From the Renaissance until roughly the 20th century, collectors were predominantly seeking out complete, undamaged pieces for their grand villas and estates, a fashion that required the employment of sculptors and artisans to remedy imperfections, and even carve new extremities.
One example includes the magnificent Statue of Resting Goat. The body, which dates to the Imperial era, features a 17th-century restoration helmed by none other than the great Baroque master Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who gave the animal new life through its head—which had been damaged and previously lost—complete with smooth, sloped horns, and lush, curly hair. To help visitors appreciate the layered history of this and other work, the museum implemented color-coded labels and diagrams that catalogue both the sculptures’ ancient past and modern refurbishments.
“This exhibition is such a unique opportunity not only for scholars, but for the general public, from school children studying the Roman Empire, to older students and specialists,” Casler Price says. “It’s a wonderful selection of works that’ll look beautiful here in the Renzo Piano galleries; it’s going to be quite something.”
Myth & Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture from the Torlonia Collection runs through Jan. 25. More information can be found at kimbellart.org.
