
The Art Institute of Chicago and the Torlonia Foundation, 2025
Available to booksellers from Yale University Press
This engaging and visually sumptuous publication explores major works of ancient Roman art through the unique holdings of the Torlonia Collection, one of the most important private collections of Roman marble sculptures in the world. The book accompanies a traveling exhibition of approximately sixty works of sculpture, which have never been seen in the United States before. The sculptures range in date from approximately the fifth century BCE to the second century CE, with the bulk of the works dating to the High Imperial period (first–second centuries CE), which is considered the height of the Roman Empire.
The Torlonia Collection, which comprises 620 works, is the largest private collection of Roman marble sculptures in Italy. It features primarily portraits of individuals, sculptures of gods and heroes, and large-scale funerary monuments, rivaling the holdings of major institutions such as the Capitoline and Vatican Museums. Of the sixty sculptures featured in the publication, almost half have never before been displayed in modern times and will be newly cleaned, conserved, studied, and rephotographed.
Represented through stunning new photography featuring multiple views and close-ups, the works are divided into sections with extended entries discussing some of the sculptures in detail. In the introductory essay, curators Lisa Ayla Çakmak and Katharine A. Raff offer an overview of Roman sculpture as seen through the Torlonia Collection; archaeologist Salvatore Settis provides greater depth on the history and formation of the collection; and Silvia Beltrametti, a specialist on art law and cultural heritage, makes connections between the cosmopolitanism of ancient Romans and our experience of their art today.
Edited by Lisa Ayla Çakmak and Katharine A. Raff
Contributions by Silvia Beltrametti, Lisa Ayla Çakmak,
Katharine A. Raff and Salvatore Settis
160 pages, 8 1/2 x 10 1/2 in.
80 color illus.
Hardcover $40 ($35 members)
ISBN: 978-0-300-279658