Doria Pamphilj Privately, and the Portrait That Was Too True

This gallery is hung the way galleries were hung in the 18th century: paintings stacked from the dado to the cornice, arranged by symmetry and by likeness of subject rather than by school or date. The arrangement follows an 18th-century inventory that records the exact place of each work, and it has been kept. Walking in is closer to seeing a private collection as its owners saw it than any other room in Rome. The four wings hold Raphael's portrait of Andrea Navagero, Titian's Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, Domenichino's Susanna and the Elders, three Caravaggios including the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, work by Annibale and Ludovico Carracci, Mattia Preti, Guercino and Guido Reni. And in a small room of its own, Velázquez's portrait of Innocent X, painted in 1650 of the pope who was born a Pamphilj. It is one of the most uncomfortable portraits ever made of a head of state: a shrewd, suspicious, unhappy man, painted without flattery. The family has kept it ever since. A private guide, in a palace that is still the family's.