Marble, Memory, and Empire: The Torlonia Collection in Montréal

A Rare Encounter with Ancient Rome at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts

Strigilated Sarcophagus with Lion, about 260-270, photo by me.

There is something quietly overwhelming about standing face-to-face with a Roman emperor.

Not a painting. Not a reproduction. But marble, cold, luminous, impossibly alive.

This is the experience of The Torlonia Collection: Masterpieces of Roman Sculpture, currently on view at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Running from March 14 to July 19, 2026, the exhibition marks a rare moment: the only Canadian stop of a historic international tour, and the first time many of these works have traveled outside Italy. 

A Collection Hidden in Time

View of exhibition Hall, Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, photo by me.

The Torlonia Collection is often described as the most important private collection of Roman sculpture in the world. Assembled in the 19th century by Prince Alessandro Torlonia, it contains over 600 Ancient Greek and Roman sculptures, many excavated from Roman estates, others acquired from older aristocratic collections. Spanning nearly a millennium, from the 5th century BCE to the 4th century CE, it is often describes as "a collection of collections."

Its formation tells a story not just of art, but of power and access. The Torlonia family, wealthy through banking and commerce, acquired entire collections, including those of Bartolomeo Cavaceppi and the Giustiniani family, while also funding excavations across Rome. In doing so, they didn't just collect antiquities, they actively shaped the afterlife of the ancient world.

In 1876,  Prince Alessandro Torlonia opened a private museum in Rome to house the collection and yet, for decades, it remained largely unseen. After being stored away after the Second World War, these sculptures existed in a kind of suspended history; known, documented, but inaccessible. 

To encounter, now, 57 of their pieces, in Montréal, feels almost improbable. Like a fragment of antiquity slipping, briefly, into the present. Portrait busts, gods and goddesses, funerary monuments, and decorative reliefs all coexist within it. In both scale and quality, the collection rivals major institutions like the Capitoline and Vatican Museums, yet for much of its history, it remained privately held. For generations, these sculptures existed in a kind of suspended state, present in textbooks, absent in reality. That absence makes their reappearance all the more powerful. With generous contributions from the Bvlgari Foundation, and the recent collaborations between the Torlonia Foundation and the Italian Ministry of Culture have enabled a global tour, allowing audiences, now, including those in Montréal, to encounter these works firsthand. 

This is why this exhibition feels more like a reintroduction.

Faces of Power, Bodies of Myth

L. Statue of Aphrodite with Eros and Ketos, first half of 2nd c. 

R. Statue of Apollo, 2nd c. , Photo by me.

Walking through the exhibition, you move between two worlds: the political and the mythological.

On one side, emperors; Marcus Aurelius, Hadrian, Commodus, their likenesses carved with striking psychological precision. These are not neutral portraits. They are instruments of power. Roman portraiture was never simply about resemblance; it was about control. Identity was constructed in marble, through hairstyle, expression, and idealisation. To look at these busts is to see how empire shapes the face itself.

And yet, just steps away, the atmosphere shifts.

You encounter gods; Hercules, Bacchus, Cupid, figures suspended between narrative and form. Their bodies are less about individuality and more about archetype: strength, pleasure, desire. 

Together, these works reveal a fundamental truth about Roman art: that mythology and politics were never separate. The emperor becomes godlike. The god becomes human.

The Illusion of Permanence

Statue of an Emperor on a Throne with a Portrait of Augustus, 1st c. , photo by me. 

What struck me most was not just the beauty of the sculptures, but their instability.

We often think of marble as permanent, unchanging, eternal. But the Torlonia works tell a different story. One of the most fascinating aspects of the collection is not what survives, but how it survives. Nearly all of the sculptures were restored between the 17th and 19th centuries, at a time when completeness was valued over authenticity. Missing limbs were replaced, heads reattached, and fragments transformed into "finished" works of art. 

Some of these restorations were carried out by artists who would later become legends, including Gian Lorenzo Bernini. In this way, many works in the collection are not purely ancient; they are collaborations across time. 

Today, this raises a quiet but compelling question: What does it mean to be "original"?

While being restored, reassembled, even reimagined across centuries, with fragments from different eras having been combined and surfaces having been altered, identities have been reassigned. In this sense, these sculptures are not fixed. They are layered histories. They remind us that what we call “classical” is often anything but stable. It is curated, reconstructed, and continuously rewritten. Beyond their histories of ownership and restoration, these works speak intimately of human experience. 

There is something quietly profound in the way these sculptures have been altered over time, how fragments from one era are joined with additions from another, how a missing arm from antiquity is replaced centuries later, how a new head is fitted onto an ancient body. The marble, in this sense, is never fixed. It evolves.

What we see in the Torlonia Collection is not simply preservation, but accumulation. Layers of history sit visibly upon one another: ancient craftsmanship, early modern restoration, and now contemporary conservation. Each intervention reflects the values of its moment, what was once considered damage becomes something to be “corrected,” what we might now see as loss was once an opportunity to complete, to beautify, to restore a kind of imagined wholeness.

And perhaps this is where the collection becomes philosophical.

Because these sculptures mirror something deeply human. We, too, are not singular or static. We are built over time, through experience, through memory, through the ways we adapt to loss and change. We add new pieces: new beliefs, new identities, new ways of seeing ourselves. And sometimes, we let go of older versions, or carry them quietly beneath the surface.

Like the marbles, we are composites.

There is no “original” self waiting somewhere beneath it all, untouched. Instead, there is a continuous process of becoming, of reshaping, restoring, reinterpreting. What might appear as fragmentation is, in another light, simply evidence of living.

In this way, the restored sculptures of the Torlonia Collection do not just tell us about the ancient world or the history of art. They remind us that transformation is not a flaw in the story, it is the story.

Why This Exhibition Matters

Sculptural Group with Infant Bacchus on a Goat, 1st-2nd c., photo by me.

To see the Torlonia Collection in Montréal is to experience a rare convergence of time and place.

At the heart of this exhibition is not just preservation, but transformation.

The Fondazione Torlonia was established to ensure that this collection, once hidden, could be studied, restored, and shared. Through conservation projects, international collaborations, and the future creation of a permanent museum in Rome, the collection is being reimagined for a new era.

And here, in Montréal, that vision becomes tangible.

To walk through this exhibition is to move through time: from ancient Rome to the 19th century, from private to public space, from fragment to form.

It reminds us that art history is not static. It is something continually uncovered, reinterpreted, and, occasionally, returned to us.

Final Reflection

Sarcophagus Lid with Reclining Couple, second half 2nd. c., photo by me.

There’s something quietly emotional about encountering works that have been unseen for so long.

Not because they are perfect, but because they are not.

They are worn, altered, restored, and reimagined. They carry the marks of time, of taste, of human intervention. And in that way, they feel less like distant relics and more like participants in an ongoing story.

The Torlonia Collection doesn’t just show us the ancient world.
It shows us how every generation chooses to see it.

These works have survived centuries of burial, collection, concealment, and restoration. Now, briefly, they are here, within reach.

But more than that, the exhibition invites us to reconsider how we look at ancient art:

• not as static relics, but as evolving objects
• not as pure forms, but as cultural constructions
• not as distant history, but as something still shaping how we understand power, beauty, and identity

A Moment Inward

Portrait of a Young Woman, known as the Maiden of Vulci, mid-1st c. BCE, photo by me.

There’s a moment in the exhibition where you lock eyes with a marble figure, and for a second, it feels reciprocal. As if the past is not just something we observe, but something that observes us back. And maybe that’s the quiet power of the Torlonia Collection; not just that it preserves history, but that it unsettles it.

Because what stands before us is never just a single moment in time. It is a whole, composed of fragments, restorations, losses, and additions. A figure built across centuries, where ancient hands and later interventions meet in one continuous form. And yet, we don’t stand there separating each piece. We take it in, all at once. We accept it as whole.

Perhaps that is what the collection asks of us, not to search for some untouched origin, but to recognise the beauty in what has been gathered, altered, and carried forward. To see how meaning emerges not despite change, but because of it.

In the end, these figures do not ask to be returned to what they once were.
They ask to be seen as they are now, layered, complex, and complete.

And standing there, looking back at them, it becomes harder not to wonder if the same might be true of us.