A group of  Aesculapius and Hygiea and its transfer from Rome to Genoa and Turin:
a note on the collection of antiquities of the House of Savoy

One of the pieces of greatest prestige in the collection of antiquities of the princes of Savoy, Italy’s former royal family, is the marble group of Aesculapius and Hygiea, still displayed in the courtyard of the Palazzo Reale in Turin. Often ignored by the earlier descriptions of the city and still today invariably ignored in modern guidebooks, the group’s history and provenance, in particular the events in the history of collecting that brought it to Turin, have hitherto remained largely unknown. This is a gap that the present article attempts, at least in part, to fill. The author has been able to reconstruct the group’s antiquarian history since the mid-sixteenth century, when it was situated in the Palazzo dei Maddaleni Capodiferro in Rome: the fame of the group, attested by antiquaries of the period and by some drawings of Renaissance artists, presumably inspired other similar sculptural compositions, such as the group of Aesculapius and Hygiea formerly in the Villa of Cardinal Ippolito d’Este a Tivoli, created by joining together two fragmentary antique statues. From Rome the group passed, at an unspecified date, into the Genoese collection of the Durazzo family, and it was together with their palace on the Via Balbi, later to become the Palazzo Reale, that the House of Savoy acquired it in 1824. Examination of the inventories preserved in the Archivio di Stato in Turin has enabled the author to reconstruct the display of statues in the garden of the Palazzo Durazzo, at one time dominated by the group of Aesculapius and Hygiea, and to identify other possible transfers of ancient sculptures from the collection of the Durazzo to that of Savoy, a collecting history that remains in large part to explore.