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The Torlonia Marbles. Collecting Masterpieces” Marks the Reopening to the Public of These Rooms of the Building

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The Torlonia Marbles. Collecting Masterpieces” Marks the Reopening to the Public of These Rooms of the Building The Torlonia Collecting Marbles. Masterpieces The first major exhibition in Rome on 2020 Press release Rome From April 4th 2020 to January 10th 2021, ninety-six marbles from the Torlonia c ollection will be on view to the public at a major show in Rome. “The Torlonia Marbles- Collecting Masterpieces” will be held in the new exhibition venue of the Musei Capitolini at Palazzo Caffarelli in Roma Capitale.The event is the first step of the agreement signed the 15th of March 2016 between the Ministry for the Cultural Heritage, Activities and Tourism and the Torlonia Foundation, and is a result of the institutional agreement subscribed by the Directorate General for Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape and the Special Superintendency of Rome with the Torlonia Foundation itself. The scientific project for enhancing the collection is entrusted to Salvatore Settis who is curating “The Torlonia Marbles-Collecting Masterpieces” with Carlo Gasparri, both archaeologists and academics of the Accademia dei Lincei. Electa, also publisher of the catalogue, organizes the exhibition. The Torlonia Foundation with the contribution of the maison Bvlgari has restored the sculptures selected. This will be the opportunity to inaugurate the new prestigious exhibition venue in Roma Capitale of the Musei Capitolini at Palazzo Caffarelli. The choice of the location was dictated by the intention to focus the show on the history of collecting. In this respect, the history of the Torlonia Museum at the Lungara (founded by Prince Alessandro Torlonia in 1875), with its 620 catalogued works of art, appears of outstanding importance. This collection is the result of a long series of acquisitions and some significant shift of sculptures between the various residences of the family. We can even say that the Torlonia marbles constitute a collection of collections or rather a highly representative and privileged cross-section of the history of the collecting of antiquities in Rome from the 15th to the 19th centuries. The items on display are not only outstanding examples of ancient sculpture (busts, reliefs, statues, sarcophagi and decorative elements), but also a reflection of a cultural process – the beginnings of the collecting of antiquities and the crucially important transition from the collection to the Museum: a process where Rome and Italy have had an indisputable primacy. In this way the exhibition traces the formation of the Torlonia Collection, and the last of its five sections eloquently relates to the adjacent exedra of bronzes and the statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Musei Capitolini, bringing out the ties between the beginnings of private collecting of antiquities and the significance of the donation of the Lateran bronzes to the city of Rome by Sixtus IV in 1471. The project to organize the exhibition of the Torlonia Collection in the renovated spaces of the new venue of the Musei Capitolini at Palazzo Caffarelli, restored to life through the commitment and the project of the Superintendency for Monuments and Cultural Properties of Rome is by David Chipperfield Architects Milan. The April 2020 event is the first stage of a traveling exhibition, for which agreements are in progress with major international museums and which will conclude with the identification of permanent spaces for the opening of a new Torlonia Museum. Ministry for the Cultural Heritage Electa press office and Activities and for Tourism Gabriella Gatto Press and Communication Office tel. +39 06 47 497 462 T. +39 06 6723.2261.2,262 [email protected] Palazzo Caffarelli The spaces laid out to the right of the staircase at the entrance to Palazzo Caffarelli, as the remains of a noble building, were sold in the mid-nineteenth century by the heirs of Baldassarre Caffarelli to the Royal Court of Prussia, which had already housed its Embassy to the Holy See in the building for some years. After the 1853 deed of sale, the first Protestant Evangelical church with an adjoining sacristy was installed in these rooms, being located there until the end of World War I, when the whole palace was expropriated by the state and later ceded to the Municipality of Rome. As part of the planned demolition of all the buildings on the hill and around it, to create a large public park intended to valorize the remains of the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter that stand within the garden, it was partly demolished. But after the excavations conducted by Roberto Paribeni in 1919-1920 had failed to produce the desired results, the building and especially the rooms on the ground floor were restored, being inaugurated in 1925 with the name of the “Museo Nuovo di Scultura Antica”, adjacent to the Museo del Palazzo dei Conservatori. This institution continued to exist, having changed its name to “Museo Nuovo” from the end of World War II until 1965, when it was closed to the public due to problems related to ordinary and extraordinary maintenance work. Only in 1999-2000, as part of the activities related to the great restructuring of the Capitoline Museums, was the restoration of the building begun, leading to the discovery of extensive sections of the archaic foundations of the Temple of Jupiter, many of them previously unknown. Further excavations were conducted in the 2002 archaeological campaign, but when in 2005 the new wing of the Musei Capitolini, called the Esedra del Marco Aurelio, was inaugurated, this part of the building together with the garden remained closed. The exhibition “The Torlonia Marbles. Collecting Masterpieces” marks the reopening to the public of these rooms of the building. Fondazione Torlonia was founded in 2014 by Prince Alessandro Torlonia with the express aim of preserving and promoting the Torlonia Collection – among the most important collections of ancient marble sculptures in the world – and Villa Albani Torlonia, one of the greatest expressions of neoclassical architecture. Together they constitute a “cultural heritage of the Family for humanity, to be handed down to future generations” Collezione Torlonia, as wonderfully described in texts and phototypy in the 1884 catalogue by Pietro Ercole Visconti, is known as the most important private collection of ancient art in the world; It owes its creation to the passion for collecting antiquities of several generations of the Torlonia Family resulting today the Torlonia Foundation. Its nucleus of over six hundred (623) marble sculptures feature sarcophagi and Greco- Roman busts and statues resulting from acquisitions of the most prominent collections of Rome’s patrician families, as well as from excavation finds made on the Family’s own estates during the course of the 19th century. the Torlonia collection has become a collection of collections, the synthesis and summa of that complex historic-cultural phenomenon referred to as the rediscovery of the ancient, and which from the early Renaissance period would lay the bases in Rome for the ‘science’ of antiquities, from the collecting of ancient art right up to the formation of modern museum collections and archaeological studies. The Museo Torlonia was itself emblematic of an historical cross-section of Rome, the very place where the socio-cultural practice of collecting antiquities in private spaces emerged. HISTORY OF THE COLLECTION The first collection set dates back to the start of the 19th century, following a public auction in which the Torlonia family acquires the collection of the sculptor Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (1717- 1799), the most famous restorer of ancient statuary of the 18th century. The collection featured a wide range of ancient marbles, terracotta, bronze statuettes, models and casts which went on to constitute the noble decoration of the family residences: the villa on the Via Nomentana, Palazzo Bolognetti and then Torlonia in Piazza Venezia and later on (1820) Palazzo Giraud, on the modern day Via della Conciliazione. With the Cavaceppi purchase, the Torlonia Family not only becomes the owner of a major collection of ancient masterpieces (statues, busts, reliefs and sarcophagi), but also among the last testimonies of some of the most ancient Roman collections of the Cinquecento and Seicento, then being gradually dispersed (such as that of Pio da Carpi, Caetani and Cesarini, etc.). in 1816 around 270 works were purchased, including the last sculptures of the gallery belonging to the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani: the most prestigious collection of ancient sculptures of the 17th century. The Torlonia heritage thus came to acquire the Hestia Giustiniani, but also the so-called Euthydemus of Bactriana, and above all an extraordinary series of imperial busts and portraits. In 1866 Prince Alessandro Torlonia (1800-1886) purchased the ancient Villa Albani by Cardinal Alessandro Albani on the Via Salaria, with his collections, gardens, picture galleries, frescoes and Greek and Roman sculptures of the highest quality, such as the famous relief with Antinoo from Villa Adriana or the precious bronze statuette of the Apollo Sauroctonous of Praxiteles. Works set up according to a specific furnishing project within a vast architectural complex built according to emotional paths; "A dream of classicism" resulting from the fruitful dialogue with the great engraver and cartographer Giovanni Battista Nolli (1701-1756) for the arrangement of the garden, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) and 'the father' of the history of modern art, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), librarian and confidant of the cardinal for the installation of the collection. At the end of the 19th century, the Collection featured a now extraordinary number of ancient marbles this marked the start of the project, implemented by Prince Alessandro, to found a Museum of Ancient Sculpture Museo Torlonia (c. 1875), reusing an old grain store in Via della Lungara, in the rooms of which the works are ordered and catalogued so as to be displayed for the admiration of small groups of visitors. Around 517 sculptures at the moment of its constitution and which had grown to 620 works, only a few years later, when reproduced in one of the early examples of a photographic catalogue of a collection of ancient art (I Monumenti del Museo Torlonia riprodotti con la fototipia, Rome, 1884-85 by C.L.
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