Portrait of Pope Innocent X

About this work

Artist

Diego Velázquez (1599–1660)

Year

c. 1650

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

141 × 119 cm

Collection

Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome

Movement

Baroque

Pope Innocent X sits in a gilded chair in a red cap, cape and white linen rochet against red hangings, holding a paper that carries Velázquez's signature, and looks out with the shrewd, wary expression of a man who has run the Church for six years. Velázquez painted it in Rome, most likely in the summer of 1650, during his second Italian journey; the pope had been reluctant to sit until he saw the painter's portrait of Juan de Pareja and the likenesses he had made of members of the papal household. Tradition says Innocent looked at the finished canvas and called it too true. The Pamphilj family kept it in private, and for two centuries only connoisseurs knew it, though many of them judged it the finest portrait ever painted. It has never left the family's Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome. Francis Bacon made dozens of screaming variations on it between 1949 and 1971.

This exhibition-poster edition shows the whole work beneath original typography set in-house. The original is in the public domain.