At the Louvre the first exhibition of marbles from the Torlonia collection outside Italy

The Louvre’s Denon Wing, in the newly restored summer apartments of Anne of Austria, home to the permanent collections of ancient sculpture since the Parisian museum’s inception in the 18th century, will host the first exhibition of Torlonia marbles outside Italy from June 26 to Nov. 11, 2024.

Focusing on masterpieces from the Torlonia collection, the exhibition will highlight the emblematic genres of Roman sculpture and the variety of its themes and styles. On display will be portraits, funerary sculptures, copies of famous Greek originals, and works inspired by Greek models from the Archaic and Classical periods. Dionysian thiasos figures and allegories will illustrate a repertoire of images and forms of Roman art. The exhibition will thus establish a dialogue between the two collections: the sculptures of the Louvre and those of the Torlonia Museum.

Since 2020, the Torlonia collection has been the focus of a series of exhibitions-events that offer the public the opportunity to rediscover, after a long period of oblivion, the exceptional collection of sculptures from the museum founded by Alessandro Torlonia in 1876 and closed in the mid-20th century.

The two stages of the exhibition, in Rome and Milan, curated by Salvatore Settis and Carlo Gasparri under the high supervision of the Special Superintendence of Rome, reconstructed the history of the collection. The Paris exhibition, under the general curatorship of Cécile Giroire, director of the Louvre’s Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, and the scientific curatorship of Martin Szewczyk, curator at the Department of Antiquities Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities at the Louvre Museum, stems from a desire to present this collection, little known in France, in a place rich in history, inviting the public to take an aesthetic and archaeological journey among the works on display, creating a dialogue with the Louvre’s collections.

The exhibition was the result of an agreement between the Ministry of Culture and the Torlonia Foundation that allowed a rich selection of the Collection’s sculptures to be rediscovered after more than 50 years of oblivion. The works from the Torlonia Collection were restored by the Torlonia Foundation with the contribution of Bulgari, Main Sponsor also of the Paris exhibition.

Image: Hestia Giustiniani, detail (Torlonia Collection) © Torlonia Foundation

At the Louvre the first exhibition of marbles from the Torlonia collection outside Italy

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