The Torlonia Marbles Offer Everything We Ask of Art

The two women are a coil of contradictions: Roman but also Greek, flesh but also stone. They both are confident, blessed with the poise of the noble and famous, yet also slightly shy. As if, after centuries of gazes, they can only appear before us slightly abashed. As if they know there is such a thing as too much beauty.

One of them is gazing down,

and one of them is gazing up.

“They stand before us like real human beings,” as the art historian Ernst Gombrich once wrote about classical sculpture, “and yet as beings from a different, better world.”

The younger of these two women is known to historians as the “fanciulla di Vulci”: a girl, or maiden, from one of the richest archaeological sites in Italy. Sculpted in the mid-first century B.C., the last years of the Roman Republic, she was pulled from the ground in the latter part of the 19th century.

Her braided hair, pulled tightly around her head, remains bound in a large circular knot:

Was this a funerary statue, commissioned by the parents of a young woman who died before she could marry? There’s no way to be certain.

But her stone earlobes are pierced. In antiquity, she would have worn earrings. The depressions in her eyes would have been inlaid with smooth ivory or glistening rock crystal.

The other woman, the older one, has an equally intricate hairstyle, though her coif is more majestic. She’s really not a woman at all, I suppose, but the goddess Aphrodite, looking to the right, crouching down, covering her breasts. It’s a pose that was first elaborated by a Greek artist, and later adapted throughout the Roman Empire.

At her foot is a honking swan. Coiling up her left biceps is an armband in the form of a snake:

Two women, two relics of Rome — but then again, not quite. There is a big difference between these two sculptures, which you can only see if you look them in the eyes.

The girl’s wide irises may be missing their inset stones, but she is gazing up at us from a distance of 2,000 years.

The goddess seems to be doing the same — but hold on. Look a little lower, at her neckline. See how the sour-cream marble of her head suddenly gives way to a stone that’s visibly more lemony, more weathered.