Galleria Doria Pamphilj

Museum · Pigna (Via del Corso)Rome,Italy

A private Rome collection still hanging in the palace the family lives in, with Velázquez's Innocent X two metres from Bernini's bust of him.

The Galleria Doria Pamphilj is a private collection still hanging in the house where it was gathered. Four wings of gallery run round a courtyard inside a palace on the Corso, and the walls are covered from floor to cornice, paintings stacked three and four deep. The family that assembled it still lives on the floor above, and the audio guide is recorded by one of them, so the voice explaining the pictures is talking about his own ancestors. At the end of one wing is a small octagonal room holding a single picture. Velázquez painted Innocent X in Rome in 1650, in only a few sittings: the pope looks hard, watchful and red-faced, in a red cape, gripping the arm of his chair. Bernini's marble bust of the same man, carved at about the same time, stands beside it. It is formal and flattering, and it looks like a different person. The two works are two metres apart, and this is the only place you can compare them.

Worth knowing

Good to know

This rarely has a queue — a major collection three minutes from Piazza Venezia can usually be entered on the day, while long lines form at smaller sights nearby.
Check the Wednesday closure before you set out — the gallery shuts on one Wednesday each month, and this is the most common reason visitors arrive to find the door locked.
Go on a bright day — these galleries are lit through the courtyard windows, and on grey afternoons the upper rows of pictures disappear into the shadow near the cornice.

Things to do

1
Stand between two portraits of the same pope
In the small octagonal room, stand between the painted portrait and the marble bust and look from one to the other. Bernini's bust shows the office rather than the man: composed, generous, in control. Velázquez paints someone who has been sitting too long and does not trust the person opposite him. Both show the same face and were made in the same year.
2
Look at a wall rather than a picture
Pick any stretch of the long galleries and take in the whole wall at once. The pictures are matched by size and shape into a pattern, with the big ones high up where nobody can study them. This is how a private collection was displayed before museums existed, when pictures decorated a room as much as they were there to be studied.
3
Find the two Caravaggios among hundreds of paintings
Two Caravaggios hang in these rooms among hundreds of other canvases, without special lighting or a rope. One shows a rest on a journey with an angel playing a violin, the other a woman weeping in a chair. Locate them yourself before checking the numbered list; that is how the gallery was meant to work.