Before the seminal exhibition of 2020 to which this volume relates, the Torlonia collection was a renowned but hidden treasure. It was the Roman banker Giovanni Torlonia (1754–1829) who started collecting ancient statues, and his son Alessandro who turned the collection into a museum around 1876. Located in Rome’s Via della Lungara, where 620 sculptures of exceptional quality were displayed, the museum was catalogued not long afterwards in Carlo Lodovico Visconti’s handsomely illustrated two-volume publication of 1884–5, the first catalogue of an ancient art collection with phototype illustrations. This remained the only source of information about the collection for several decades. A private collection open only to select visitors, the Torlonia museum became almost inaccessible after the Second World War. When the palazzo in which it was housed was converted into apartments in the 1970s, the statues were moved to storage, where they remained for the next fifty years. Scholars who studied the Torlonia sculptures never got to see the pieces themselves; on the positive side, hidden from sight and safeguarded by Italian legislation from the early twentieth century, the collection has come down to us almost unaltered.