The exhibition catalogue for I marmi Torlonia. Collezionare capolavori (also available in English: The Torlonia Marbles. Collecting Masterpieces) opens with the requisite statements from ministers and public figures, and a voice from the main funding body, in this case, Bvlgari. In the funder's statement J.-C. Babin notes: ‘This exhibition will provide the general public of Rome and probably also an international audience the chance to admire these incredible, unique pieces, true jewels of classical art’. The exhibition displayed 92 objects from the largest collection of antiquities still in private hands, out of the 620 total antiquities held by the family. The collection has been largely inaccessible to researchers, a situation around which curator Settis delicately dances in the first essay: ‘it must be added that for decades the collection, due to occurrences which it is not the place to retrace here, was not open to visitors’ (p. 21). The works have been cleaned and restored, and they are displayed in a newly built exhibition space in the Villa Caffarelli attached to the Capitoline Museums; the exhibition was extended repeatedly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Overlapping with the Torlonia exhibition, the Galleria Borghese hosted an exhibition from Damien Hirst's project The Wreck of the Unbelievable. Coliva, director of the Borghese and co-curator of the exhibition Archaeology Now with Codognato, characterised the exhibition in relation to the gallery: ‘I intended to make clear and evident the qualifying element in the Villa Borghese that constitutes a value in itself, distinct from the more obvious one that is its magnificent collection: that of multiformity, polychromy, the variety of the materials and techniques with which the edifice is covered and adorned, from the modulations of the frames to the bases of the statues’ (p. 217). Hirst's multimedia semi-hoax (painting, sculpture in multiple materials, film) surfaced, then sank, first at the Venice Biennale in 2017; the Borghese redisplay of many of the Unbelievable works offered a more sympathetic environment in which the deeply varied collection of antiques, creatively restored and reinvented pieces, and modern sculpture play against each other and the architectural settings.
While these two exhibitions ostensibly focused on opposite content (ancient, largely anonymous works versus contemporary work from the past decade by a single artist's workshop), their concurrent display and their accompanying exhibition catalogues present similar (if often tacit) issues around collecting, authenticity, materiality and wealth. I will predominantly focus on the exhibition catalogues, but necessarily the experience of visiting the shows shapes the books and their ongoing scholarly utility for those who were not able to visit. The Torlonia exhibition opened in October 2020 and was due to close first in June 2021, but was extended until January 2022; before the pandemic a travelling exhibition to the Louvre was intended (and the catalogue includes a statement from the President-Directeur of the Louvre to this effect). The Hirst exhibition had a far shorter tenure, opening on 8 June 2021 and closing on 7 November 2021.
The Torlonia Marbles exhibition makes excellent use of the new display wing in the Villa Caffarelli, which largely directs the visitor in a linear fashion through the space allowing for cross-room views and focused displays of single or double small objects between the larger rooms. The catalogue is divided into two sections, with short scholarly essays in the first half of the volume, object essays with excellent photographs, including full scholarly apparatus in the second half, and two final essays on the exhibition production and restorations following the objects. The twelve essays in the front half of the volume cover both the expected topics relating to the history of the Torlonia collection as a whole (Settis, Gasparri, D. Porro), its position within collection histories in Rome at various periods (K.W. Christian, A.M. Riccomini, C.P. Presicce), antiquarianism (M.E. Micheli, D. Gallo) and restoration practices (L. de Lachenal, T. Montanari), and some less expected contributions on seriality and copying and Canova's Hercules and Lichas in the Torlonia collection (A. Anguissola, M.V. Clarelli). The essays are short but dense, and clearly aimed more at scholars than general readers despite the declarations at the outset of the catalogue that the show would be bringing the Torlonia Marbles to a new public and the relatively low cost of the hardcover catalogue; translations of historic quotations and inscriptions are inconsistently provided across the essays, while many of the texts contain long runs of names unfamiliar to the non-specialist. This scholarly density reinforces the value of the essays to historians and Classicists, but may be somewhat off-putting to casual readers of the catalogue.
Replicating the organisation of the exhibition, the catalogue entries are prefaced in each section by a further short text explaining the theme of the room or rooms (displayed in reverse chronological order): ‘The Torlonia Museum’, ‘Torlonia Excavations’, ‘Villa Albani and the Cavaceppi Studio’, ‘The Antiquities Collection of Vincenzo Giustiniani’ and ‘The Collections of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century’. Even without the critical essays, the object histories and discussions would make this volume invaluable to scholars of antique art, collecting histories, classical receptions, and conservation and display studies. Of particular benefit are the photographs from different angles of objects like the Vase with the Labours of Hercules (cat. 37), allowing readers to see not just inside the large basin but into the connecting metalwork between the granite stand and the marble; many of the works also include comparanda, historic depictions of the work in print and photography (both on display in cat. 49, a copy of the Boy with Goose of Boethos), and fine details lost in the primary object photo (such as cat. 41, a Marble Crater with a Dionyisian Thiasos). While the future of the collection and access to it are still uncertain, the catalogue is an excellent starting resource to key works and their post-classical context. Following the object entries there are two final texts, a short statement from D. Chipperfield, part of the architectural firm responsible for the new display space, and an essay from A.M. Carruba on the research and restoration campaign of the works themselves. Chipperfield briefly outlines the design process for the display in concert with Settis and Gasparri, which is unusual in exhibition catalogues. Carruba's essay on the technical investigations and restoration, with diagrams of various historic restorations, is perhaps the single most valuable of the essays, clearly explaining the material and aesthetic concerns for major objects in the exhibition.
The Hirst catalogue, by contrast, fills the first 216 pages with photos from the exhibition, with three sparse title pages and the room titles as the only text. These photos are by turns clear and dizzying, with macro-photographs of marble grain and fake coral mixed with installation views of the fake antiques alongside the Borghese's permanent collection. Some works are given effective two-page spreads, like the three Severed Head of Medusa pieces in malachite, gold and silver, and bronze with painted additions, and the silver Hydra and Kali, in which the most effective staging from the exhibition is recorded: a life-size nymph in Domenichino's La Caccia di Diana (1616) gazes out at the viewer over the head of the small silver group, as if she is in on the joke. Given the limited numbers of visitors allowed into the museum every day, and the relatively short span of the exhibition, the quality of the photos for the objects and installation are useful documents of the show for scholars. Indeed, the photography in places serves to reinforce the game Hirst's sculptures play with the genuine antiques; a view of the black granite Children of a Dead King seen from the Stanza del Sole into the Sala di Apollo e Dafne reduces signs of the works’ modernity and visually embeds it into the fabric of the room through the overlapping arrangement of antiques, especially the material similarity to a nero antico urn and the pudica gesture shared by a Venus and the male figure in the modern group.
It is clear that the show and the works are most convincing and compelling when Hirst is engaging with other artists’ work. The aforementioned Children works, apparently showing the captive children of a dead pharaoh, or perhaps Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene II, invert the gender of Michelangelo's Rebellious Slave and Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave and paper over the quotations with the visual cues of dynastic Egypt. This is an especially layered reference, given Powers’ Greek Slave is itself a neoclassical reimagining of the pudica type, after the Venus de’ Medici. The direct engagement with antique or modern art and material culture remained effective across the show: a Demon with Sacrificial Bowl evoked Rodin; a bronze Bacchus group with nude portrait of the sleeping Hirst and two ithyphallic satyrs displayed on a table was likewise easy to mistake as an antique or Baroque invention until closer inspection. The display of Hirst's fake antiques alongside the genuine items and the heavily mediated modern restorations do a significant amount of legwork to overcome (frankly accurate) complaints around the individual objects that many of them simply do not look convincingly ‘ancient’ and that their production value and style undermines the effect. Pieces like the blue granite, gold and white agate Unknown Pharaoh (in fact a portrait of musician Pharrell Williams) take on a more convincing aura from their installation and museum labels. Where the show falls flat are the pieces that straightforwardly reproduce contemporary media properties (Disney characters, Voltron), the tedious, often misogynist attempts to be ‘edgy’ or provocative (the gimp masked heads in black marble, the life-size Minotaur violently raping a woman in graphic anatomical accuracy), or where the scale and production actively undermine the effectiveness of the design (the monumental bronze Hydra and Kali on the terrace).
Three essays from Coliva, Codognato and G. Leardi follow the images and offer the sum total of scholarly commentary on the exhibition or Hirst's work. Coliva's essay positions the show within her larger exhibition campaign and her views on the Borghese as a historic and living exhibition space. As an explanation for why Hirst, why now, and how the institution sees itself, this is an excellent piece. Codognato's essay surveys Hirst's oeuvre and is clearly written for cognoscenti, rather than convincing sceptics or neophytes of the intellectual and creative value of Hirst's painting and sculpture – Hirst's Colour Space paintings ‘break the rules of symmetrical eurythmy and become torsional and indistinct’ (p. 225). In the paintings ‘the energetic surges of enamel paint evoke tremulous movement, tectonic plates sliding slowly over one another’ (p. 226). While the evocative language is seductive, it is worth pointing out that these are paintings of multicolour dots on white ground, with drips and visible imperfections, and this kind of text is often alienating to people who have not already bought into Hirst's whole thing. More convincing is the footnote explaining the rules for the series of Spot Paintings, and another note about his painting naming process – stealing colour names from paint companies (p. 229). I had hoped for more engagement with the ‘antique’ and ‘classical’ premise of the works, which was included in the labels in the show, but is almost totally absent here.
The biggest downside to the catalogue is that there are no texts for the objects themselves, nor the fake histories that were displayed in the gallery. This means that readers who did not attend the show or who did, but did not take documentary photos of the labels for all 86 objects, have no record of the narrative within the gallery space. While Leardi's essay, subtitled ‘Matter and Deception’, oscillates between acknowledging the ‘paradoxes’ of the works’ materiality and subjects and engaging with the scenario by treating them as real, if hard to explain antiques, the focus is primarily on the materials and not on exploring the objects’ narratives (pp. 240–1). This, with Coliva's essay, textually clarifies the implied visual and material relationships established in the first section of the catalogue, between Hirst's works and the Borghese's collections. However, the relationships between the various versions of the same works are not clear in the book. Three different versions of each item were available to buy. While the catalogue list of objects notes where the objects are, their editions and how many were made, the distinction between the real-fake antiques (the Coral editions), the restored fake antiques (Treasures) and the fake-fake antiques (the Copy, either in small or exhibition scale) is otherwise totally collapsed. As an ongoing resource for scholars, this overview is therefore far less useful or compelling than it could have been, and it will likely not convince the numerous sceptics in art history, classics and classical receptions studies that the work is valuable beyond its commercial price tag. And at US$80, the price tag for the catalogue alone will put off any casual scholar interested in perhaps pursuing a new avenue of contemporary research.
The Torlonia Marbles and Damien Hirst's Archaeology Now both engage with the act of collecting and displaying, restoring and replicating, and the creation of cultural capital with objects from the past. While Hirst's objects come from an imagined ‘past’, both shows openly acknowledge that their material is mediated and remade by many hands at every stage. The catalogues are clearly not aimed at the same audience, although perhaps some common ground between the scholarly and the sale catalogue might have been struck on both ends. Scholars of classical art and receptions will, however, find useful material in both volumes.
