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. 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’. 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). [...]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.
TWO EXHIBITIONS IN ROME: I marmi Torlonia. Collezionare capolavori. Pp. 335, b/w & colour ills. Milan: Electa, 2021. Cased, €39. ISBN: 978-88-918-2925-2 . Codognato, (M.), Coliva, (A.) (edd.);Damien Hirst: Archaeology Now. Pp. 304, colour ills. Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2021. Cased, US$80. ISBN: 978-88-297-1046-1