The two women are coils of contradiction. Not only Roman, but also Greek, meat, as well as stone. They are both confident and blessed with the calm of a noble and famous person, but a little shy. As if after centuries of gaze they could feel slightly embarrassed before us. As if they knew there was too much beauty.
One of them stares at me,
And one of them stares at me.
“They stand before us like real humans,” art historian Ernst Gombrich once wrote of classical sculpture, “but still as beings of another, better world.”
Among these two women, the young man is known by historians as “Fansiuradivursi.” Sculpted in the mid-3rd century BC, the last year of the Roman Republic, she was pulled out of the ground in the late 19th century.
Her braided hair, pulled tightly around her head, remains tied to a large circular knot:
Was this a funeral statue commissioned by the parents of a young woman who died before marriage? There's no way to make sure.
However, her stone ears are piercing. In ancient times, she would have worn earrings. The trembling of her eyes would have been inserted with smooth ivory or shining rock crystals.
The older woman, the other woman, has similarly complicated hairstyles, but her coif is even more majestic. I don't think she's really a woman, but Goddess Aphrodite looks to her right, squats down, covering her breasts. It is a pose that was first detailed by Greek artists and later adapted to the entire Roman Empire.
Her feet are ringing swans. It is a snake-shaped armband that erects her left biceps.
Two women, two relics of Rome – but again, not. There is a big difference between these two sculptures. This can be seen if it is visible.
The girl's wide iris may be missing the stones in the insert, but she is staring at us from two thousand years of distance.
The goddess seems to be doing the same thing, but holds it. Take a look at her neckline a little down. Watch how the sour cream marble on her head suddenly gives way to more lemons, more weathered stones, all of which are visible.
Only the Aphrodytite crouching body has been around since the first century. The arm with the snake bangle is from ancient times, but the head was carved and grafted by the artist Pietro Bernini (father of the much-known Gian Lorenzo Bernini), one to six hundred years later, during the later Renaissance.
Members of the noble family, who once owned this fragmentary Venus, turned to artists of their generation to revive her. Her downcast eyes are modern. Some talents and fortunes can bring God back to Earth.
Old and new. It's authentic and ideal. Life and immortality. Everything we ask about art is in the eyes of these women, only two of the 58 extraordinary works of “Mythology and Marble: Ancient Roman Sculptures of the Trulonia Collection.” This exhibition illuminates the end of the Roman Prince's Art Collection. (The show tour will be a tour to Fort Worth and Montreal in 2026 later this year.)
Built through successive acquisitions of aristocratic collections, 622 sculptures are blown away. This is 621 marble and one amazing bronze. The quality is amazing. To see more detailed possessions of Roman art, you will have to go to the Vatican and the Louvre Museum.
Much of the collection consists of portraits of the Emperor and Emissions of the Trulonian banker and Prince Alessandro Trulonian (1800-66), whose promotion was made up of Prince Alessandro Trulonian (1800-66) to a scientific corporation.
The impressive display of Chicago's Imperial Bust is a lead from Hadrian, and is immediately recognised by his strict Mayen and tight beard.
His successors are one of Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher emperor, and a more shy beard, imitating his favorite Greek thinker.
But the bust is only half of that. Mythical and literary themes are followed by marbles, such as Odysseus, who escapes from the nest of the cyclops under the hairy ram.
Some unusual examples of unharmed large funeral monuments. There is a cod of stones of amazing refinement, ringing in all four directions in the scene of Hercules' labor.
In the niche on the far left, you can see Strongman working on the Nemian Lion. Next, we will wear lion skin and club the human head Hydra.
Surprisingly, the stone co-cover is also here. The couple who once died in a marble box is also shown above, reclining at an eternal banquet. But don't assume too much from their faces. The head you are looking at now belongs to other Roman couples, and in modern times it was soldered.
Even if you treat it as just a showcase of Roman sculptures, “mythology and marble” would deserve a wreath of all praise. But it's more than ancient times. It is also about a special collection with a recent past, a strange history.
The Trulonia collection, which was moved by Alessandro Trulonia to a private museum in Rome in 1875, was hidden in the early 1940s. And when World War II ended, they didn't leave again.
The conflict between the family and the government concealed the marble and collected dust and dirt.
Over all these years, scholars had to plead to enter. One government official relied on Prince Trulonia to dress as a more cleaner, seeing what gems were confused.
The only hint of prizes trapped inside these wet Trastevere reservoirs was an old catalogue published in 1885, where all the marbles were recreated with the then-novel technology of camera-based sculptures.
Finally, the first restored masterpiece was exhibited in 2020 at the Capitlin Museum. Like an exhibition in Chicago, the show included grant goats that scholars knew about grand goats swirling like grand goats below Ma, and sculptures that their magical heads were restored by Gian Lorenzo Bernini itself.
And just as the public discovered these once secret masterpieces, the Trulonia Foundation used serial travel shows to repair and restore its holdings. Over 24 of the 58 sculptures have been newly cleaned in Chicago.
The premier includes busts of several prominent empire women, such as Fautina the Young, daughter of Antoninus Pius and wife of Marcus Aurelius. Look down from her tug hair to her full cheeks. You are looking at the predicted image of a stable empire's succession.
Previous versions of the Torlonia Show highlighted the development of the collection over the 19th century. Bank families were accumulated by purchasing the entire collection from aristocrats who fell during difficult times. The family also undergoes extensive excavations in the Italian countryside. In this countryside, with varying degrees of care, he unraveled the masterpieces of Vulsi's young maiden.
In Chicago, the history of collection is pushed up to one side. However, by installing the sculptures in the cunning on the Art Institute's spare modern extension, designed by Renzo Piano, the curators highlighted another aspect of Trulonia's marble. In a powerful sequence of white whites, they prevent us from considering these “Roman” artwork as time travelers.
In the last century, various striped fascists projected national fantasies on such cold stones. Online today, sophomore social media hellenists powered past racist delusions with Greek and Roman statues.
But here we see nothing in ancient Rome. Most are ancient marble extensions with just-quarried alternatives. Ancient images arrive after centuries of remakes and recycling, interchanges and marriage.
Rome is a multi-ethnic, multilingual empire and is pleased to wholesale the entire foreign religious pantheon. Its architecture, literature, educational curriculum, and statues derived from the distant society that has been conquered. (This is where Horace is cited about the cultural endurance of the occupied people: “The captured Greece captured her fierce prisoners and brought art to the simple latium.”)
And the Elite Romans, immortalized with these marble busts, of course, spoke Greek.
See the incredible relief of Portos: Sit at the mouth of Tiber, the vision of the imperial port of the capital. This is a carved marble slab filled with merchant ships and sailors of distant sales.
Overlooked by the hairy Neptune, imported from one ocean to another without Qualm.
Although I don't know enough about who made these marbles, scholars believe that most “Roman” artists were Greeks, perhaps slaves or liberated, and adapted to the famous Greek example for local audiences.
One of the most impressive artworks of the Trulonia collection, the 16-foot-high statue of Goddess Hestia (or Vesta to the Romans), is also one of the most intentionally old-fashioned. Known as Hestia Giustiniani, it comes from the time of Hadrian, but has been reproduced with positive poses and hard curtains that recreate Greek bronze since the 5th century BC
It was a world of avatars and images, cults and memorials. There were so many statues in ancient Rome, and observers spoke about the second Roman population, made of stone and bronze. Living politicians can become marble gods and exist on public glasses and private property.
The best emotions were intertwined with the dullest propaganda. Corruption, violence, embarrassing imperialism: all this could coexist with the most sophisticated cultural efforts that will endure and mature as the republic transitions to dictatorship.
These statues ask: what is power, who deserves it, and how long can it last? What is culture and what happens when you meet someone else? Also, how is it remarated through contact and conquest?
The cultural tradition that gave us our laws and our language has always positioned the faces and bodies of these stones as art. In 2025, when the most fundamental issues of the nation and self are on the line, it feels like the art of time. We are also time travelers, so we fail backwards and forwards, so we don't know which direction is which. We live in abandoned ins and are rescued from marble to save our feet the values and virtues we can have.
Myths and Marble: Ancient Roman Sculptures from the Trulonia Collection
Until June 29th, at the Art Museum of Chicago, artic.edu. The show will travel to the Kinbell Museum in Fort Worth on September 14th and the Montreal Museum in March 2026.
Image: “Statue of Crouching Aphrodite”, Photo by Fondazion Trulonia. “Portrait of a Young Woman,” photographed by Lorenzo de Masi, the Trulonia Foundation. “Portrait of a Young Woman” via Fondazione Torlonia, photographed by photograph. “Mythology and Marble Installation View: Ancient Roman Sculptures from the Trulonia Collection,” Fonda Zion Trulonia, “Portrait of Hadrian” via the Trulonia Foundation, Photographed by Lorenzo de Masi. “Portrait of Marcus Aurelius,” by Fondazion Trulonia, Photo by Agostino Osio. “Statue of Odysseus under the Ram,” photographed by Fondazion Trulonia. “A Stone Co depicting the Labor of Hercules,” photographed by Lorenzo de Masi, the Trulonia Foundation. “The Lid with a Reclining Couple,” photographed by the Trulonia Foundation and Lorenzo Demasi. Photographed by Franco Bocchino by Franco Bocchino, “Torlonia Museo Catalog” by Franco Bocchino. “Statue of a Resting Goat,” photographed by Lorenzo de Masi, the Trulonia Foundation. “Portrait of Faustina the Young” via the Trulonia Foundation, photographed by Lorenzo de Masi. “Mythology and marble installation view: Ancient Roman Sculptures from the Trulonia Collection” installed at the Art Institute in Chicago, photographed by the Trulonia Foundation, Lorenzo Demasi. “Portrait of a man known as the old man in Otricolia,” photographed by Lorenzo de Masi, the Trulonia Foundation. Photo by “Portos Relief” through the Trulonia Foundation, by Lorenzo Demasi. “Statue of the Goddess known as Hestia Giustiniani,” photographed by the Trulonia Foundation, Lorenzo de Masi. “The Emperor's Statue in Portrait of Augustus,” photographed by Lorenzo de Masi through the Trulonia Foundation. “Mythology and Marble Installation View: Ancient Roman Sculptures from the Trulonia Collection”
