Notes from a Visit to the Doria Pamphilj: Tracing the Mystery of the Small Head of Innocent X

During a recent visit to the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj in Rome, I spent some time looking closely at Velázquez’s famous Portrait of Pope Innocent X. Like many visitors, I was struck by the psychological intensity of the painting. But what drew my attention even more was the smaller head of the pope displayed nearby. The relationship between the two works raised a number of questions that have stayed with me since the visit.

At first glance, the smaller head bears a strong resemblance to the great portrait. The colors, tonal structure, and overall technique suggest someone deeply familiar with Velázquez’s method. Yet the painting also feels slightly different. The forms appear somewhat chunkier, the drawing a bit less precise, and certain transitions in the face seem more generalized. These differences led me to wonder whether the painting might be the work of someone very close to Velázquez, rather than Velázquez himself.

My first hypothesis was that the work might have been painted by Juan de Pareja, Velázquez’s assistant and later a painter in his own right. Pareja traveled with Velázquez to Italy in 1649 and worked closely with him during the Roman period when the portrait of Innocent X was painted. Because Pareja prepared pigments and assisted in the studio, he would have had intimate knowledge of Velázquez’s materials and techniques. This could explain why the smaller head appears to share similar color structures and underpainting. At the same time, the slight awkwardness in proportion and modeling might reflect the hand of a talented but less experienced painter working under the influence of a master.

While exploring the question further, I unexpectedly encountered reproductions on Wikipedia of two sheets of drawings described as studies of Pope Innocent X. These drawings had been published in 1976 by Mary Cazort Taylor in European Drawings from Canadian Collections and were then said to belong to the collection of the art historian and museum curator Theodore Allen Heinrich. According to Taylor, the sheets were reportedly found in the library of the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj.

The drawings are intriguing. On each sheet the pope’s head appears in several orientations—frontal, profile, and partial views—alongside small sketches of the seated composition. At first glance they resemble preparatory studies, and Taylor cautiously suggested they might be by Velázquez. However, the more I examined them, the more they seemed to raise questions.

Velázquez is not known to have produced many preparatory drawings. His working method appears to have relied heavily on painting directly from life. Moreover, the structure of these sheets feels less like a focused preparatory study and more like an analytical exploration of the pope’s face and pose from several angles.

This led me to consider a different possibility. By the early 1650s, not long after the famous portrait was painted, sculptors such as Alessandro Algardi were producing busts of Innocent X. Once both the painting and sculptural likenesses existed, an artist interested in studying the pope’s appearance could have used both the painting and the sculptures as models. The drawings might therefore represent the work of a later artist attempting to understand the pope’s features and the composition of the portrait, rather than preparatory sketches by Velázquez himself.

If that is the case, it could also help explain why the drawings were reportedly preserved in the palace library but eventually left the Pamphilj collection. Works considered secondary or derivative—studio studies, copies, or exercises—were often dispersed quietly from aristocratic libraries in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries.

My investigation is still ongoing. The drawings were once in Heinrich’s collection, and I have begun contacting archives that hold his papers to see whether any documentation survives about how he acquired them. If correspondence, photographs, or acquisition notes exist, they may help clarify when the drawings left the Pamphilj library and how they entered the modern art market.

For now, the small head of Innocent X and the curious drawings associated with it remain part of a puzzle—one that connects Velázquez, Pareja, Roman sculptors, and later artists who may have studied one of the most penetrating portraits ever painted.