The Art Institute of Chicago is set to unveil Myth & Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture from the Torlonia Collection (March 15 – June 29, 2025), showcasing 58 extraordinary Roman sculptures from the renowned Torlonia Collection. This marks the marbles’ first trip to North America. We spoke with exhibition co-curator Katharine Raff* about the collection, her role as a curator, her favorite object from the exhibition, and more.
*Katharine A. Raff is the Elizabeth McIlvaine Curator, Arts of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has worked since 2011. Her research focuses on ancient Roman art, with a particular emphasis on sculpture and the contexts in which such objects were made, used, and viewed over time. Katharine was the editor and primary author of the 2017 digital scholarly catalogue Roman Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (2017), and she has also published on the museum’s holdings in Greek, Etruscan, and Byzantine art. She holds a PhD from the University of Michigan and was previously awarded fellowships from the United States Fulbright Program and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“This is the first time that these 58 objects will be traveling to North America. For 24 of these, this is the first time that they are on display in more than 70 years. So, a lot of firsts with this show.”
Could you share some information about the exhibition? What is particularly exciting about it?
This exhibition will bring 58 rarely-seen ancient Roman marbles from the Torlonia Collection to North America for the first time. What’s really exciting is that 24 of these have been newly cleaned, conserved, and studied specifically for this exhibition. So we’ve worked really closely with the Torlonia Foundation and their labs, which are dedicated to conserving and studying the whole collection. So we’re really excited to have this whole corpus of objects coming.
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Sign up to our Free Weekly NewsletterThe particular sculptures we have selected range in date from the fifth century BCE through the early fourth century CE. The majority of these date to the Roman Imperial Period and reflect a range of different types of sculptures. We have sculptures of deities, heroes, and other mythological figures, a large section of portraits, and, more specifically, portraits of the royal family of the second century CE. There is also a number of funerary monuments, including massive sarcophagi and others that are less frequently seen in the US, but also other smaller funerary monuments as well as relief sculptures. So it’s a nice array of different types of objects.
What’s really exciting for us about this particular exhibition is that this is the first time that these 58 objects will be traveling to North America. For 24 of these works, this is the first time that they are on display in more than 70 years. So, a lot of firsts with this show.
The history of the Torlonia marbles is a long one. Could you tell us about it?
The Torlonia Collection is the most important private collection of sculptures worldwide. There are 622 works in the collection. They are all marbles except one that is a long, large-scale bronze, which is typical of the survival of large-scale bronzes from antiquity to today. The collection, in terms of its depth and breadth, is really on par with the collections of major public museums in Europe, especially in Rome and museums like the Capitoline and the Vatican Museums.
The collection was formed in the 19th century by Prince Giovanni Torlonia (1754–1829) and his son Prince Alessandro (1800–1886). It was formed in different ways. Part of this was through the acquisition of earlier prestigious early modern collections, including parts of the collection of the Giustiniani family, parts of the studio of the Italian sculptor Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, and the estate known as Villa Albani, which exemplified mid-18th century antiquarian taste. They amassed a collection through these other prestigious collections, but also because the Torlonia family, though their wealth and real estate portfolio, also had a lot of land and were excavating on their land. Through this, they were able to further expand their collection, which they then displayed in a private museum in the late 19th century which remained accessible to some extent up until the wake of World War II, after which it went unseen for decades.
“This particular project has been such a dream come true.”
At TheCollector, our audience consists of academics, art and history enthusiasts, but also students, many of whom are considering their future career paths. I think it would be interesting if you could share a bit about your role as a curator in a major exhibition like this one.
Incidentally, I have wanted to be a curator since I was an undergraduate, so it has been a lifelong dream to be able to pursue this career path. As an art historian, I am a Romanist by training and one of my main areas of specialization is Roman sculpture. So, this particular project has been such a dream come true. I can’t stress enough what an opportunity of a lifetime it is to get to work with this storied collection.
There are lots of different things that curators do. With exhibitions, obviously, so much of it is storytelling — thinking what are the stories we want to tell, what are the objects that help tell this story, and how that will reach our audiences here in Chicago and North America.
For this project, I worked closely with my co-curator, Lisa Ayla Çakmak, and again, we were really fortunate to have this opportunity to work with the Torlonia Foundation. There were conversations pre-pandemic, and after several years, we were finally able to see an entirely new project come to fruition. We really wanted this, as the second major project that the Torlonia Foundation is doing, to take a different approach both with the selection of objects and also our interpretation of those objects.
The foundation was really generous in allowing us to look all across the board at the whole collection of 622 objects, which is a lot to select from. On the one hand, 90 or so works were conserved for their recent presentation in Europe. Some of those works are the “icons” of the collection, the things I saw in textbooks as an undergrad and graduate student. Works like the Maiden of Vulci, the Pontus relief, and the Republican portrait known as the Old Man of Otricoli. It felt very critical to be able to highlight these icons of the collection that so many of us—at least in the scholarly field—have known from books, but no one had ever seen in person. It was a wonderful opportunity to be able to bring these works to Chicago for all our audiences, and not just scholars, to see, enjoy, and learn about.
We also had this other wonderful opportunity: to select from the rest of the collection. Of course, as you can imagine, this was quite challenging because there are so many works and such a diversity of subjects and types. We are looking at the collection’s strengths and considering questions like: what do non-specialists want? What would speak to them? Where is the name recognition, i.e., the entry point for our audiences? What will get them in the door? And even if they didn’t plan to come here, what would make them stop and enter our exhibition? We know that on a general level, a lot of people have some basic knowledge or at least some name recognition of the gods and heroes from classical mythology, as well as things like popular culture. Especially after the Gladiator movies recently people know Marcus Aurelius or Commodus. There is some aspect of meeting people where they are but also taking them on a journey from there.
So, with the objects that we have selected and that were newly conserved, there is a lot of name recognition with members of the imperial family of the second century, the Five Good Emperors and their family members. Also, with these new selections, we have tried to find objects that reflect the array of deities of the Roman pantheon and things that our audience is less familiar with, such as the “foreign deities” that were brought syncretically into the Roman World. With that, we have the objects you might expect, such as statues of the Roman Emperors and statues of deities, but also less familiar types. For example, there is one sculptural type called the Ephesian Artemis, which may not look so classical. One of the aims is to open people’s eyes to the variety of Roman sculpture, and we are really grateful to the Foundation for supporting us in our vision and allowing us to do something that, we think, will be more relatable and accessible and speak to an array of audiences and not just specialists and scholars.
“We really tried to help visitors understand that although our media is digital today, we live in an image-saturated world, much like the Romans.”
We talked about how curators and audiences may perceive the marbles today. Let’s talk about how sculptures would have been perceived in the past in their original context. Is there a way to bridge this gap between past and present and help the audience understand how these objects were intended to be seen?
We have been thinking about the fact that the Roman was such a visual culture, very much in the way that our world is today. In the Roman World, sculpture was everywhere. Sculpture was the primary medium used to communicate all sorts of messages. This is why scholars have sometimes talked about sculpture as Rome’s second population. This is partly because if you think about the expanse and greatest extent of the Empire in the second century, you have this very culturally, linguistically, religiously, and ethnically diverse population under a unified rule, where not everybody speaks the same language or even can read it for that matter. Images and sculptures were really the primary medium that was experienced by people across the social spectrum.
About your question regarding context, sculptures were in various public spaces such as baths, gymnasia, libraries, theaters, and amphitheaters, but they were also part of people’s homes and domestic spaces, especially for the elite. They were found in funerary contexts, in tombs, outside of tombs, and, of course, in religious settings such as temples and sanctuaries. Sculptures were everywhere! The Romans were very particular about the clues that iconography, attributes, and other motifs could tell about the use of space. For example, a statue of Aphrodite—a goddess who was born in the sea—might have been found in a public bath context.
We really tried to help visitors understand that although our media is digital today, we live in an image-saturated world, much like the Romans. Although they obviously lived in a very different world than ours, they communicated through images.
“There is something humbling about the thought that these objects have outlived us and will continue to outlive us and that we are their temporary stewards right now.”
What makes this exhibition particularly important today?
The quality and the quantity, the breadth and the depth of this collection are unique. It is incredibly rare to get this opportunity to see all these artistic treasures. Often you have to go to Rome to see something like this. So, the ability to share this collection with audiences in North America and the broader public really feels like bringing a piece of Rome to Chicago, and it is something that we are celebrating right now.
It’s been a lot of work in the making. What makes the Torlonia collection so interesting and important is that it has some history around it because it has not been accessible for decades and as I alluded to before, this is something that we scholars have seen in textbooks but, for the most part, nobody has seen in public. To be able to bring these works out and get a glimpse of them and experience them is in itself important because there is no substitute for seeing the objects in person. For people to see such a large corpus of this collection is, in my view, remarkable.
The other remarkable thing is that these objects have lived multiple lives, which is another theme of the exhibition. Yes, they are ancient sculptures, but since the time they were made, they have been buried, broken, uncovered, restored, and conserved. They have these modern afterlives that began even before they entered the Torlonia Collection. There are works that have had historic restorations by famous sculptors like Gian Lorenzo Bernini. These works had different lives even as they entered the Torlonia Collection in the 19th century. We can sort of think about these works as collaborations that started in antiquity and continued in the centuries that followed.
There is something humbling about the thought that these objects have outlived us and will continue to outlive us and that we are their temporary stewards right now. The last point to that is that there is a lot of work to be done with this collection. We are really excited to be in this next stage of work, but it is such an important collection, and there is still more work, conservation, and research that we look forward to see occurring in the decades to come.
What is your favorite object from the collection?
This is such a difficult question to answer, but having to choose, I would say that one of my absolute favorites is the Portus Relief. It is an absolutely stunning, jaw-dropping object. It’s a 4-foot wide relief depicting the harbor at Portus, which was the port of Imperial Rome. It is really fascinating, kind of like a visual company of subjects and motifs. You have a scene at the harbor with these really detailed merchant ships and crew. Then, there is also a mix of the monuments that may have been in Portus. There are statues and pedestals, a lighthouse, and an arch in the background. There are also these imagined or allegorical elements, which are a lot to take in but, at the same time, so rare and unusual. If you can take the time to just sit and look at it, it really rewards you as a viewer. We are working with our experience design team on a video that will be in the exhibition and also on a website that will highlight aspects of the relief.
Finally, another part I find exciting about this sculpture is that it still preserves visible traces of some of its pigments. Not a lot, but there are traces of red in the flame on the lighthouse and some other areas. As we know, sculpture was painted in antiquity, and we often don’t have remains of that anymore, but this object still retains some visible traces, so we are excited to share that.
