Galleria Doria Pamphilj: Sleep and Sorrow

Why is it significant?

Here on Via del Corso, the long, grand front of Palazzo Doria Pamphilj hides one of the great private art collections of Rome, still owned by the family whose name it carries. Inside, in rooms of gilded frames and mirrors, hang two of Caravaggio's most tender early paintings.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Here on Via del Corso, the long, grand front of Palazzo Doria Pamphilj hides one of the great private art collections of Rome, still owned by the family whose name it carries. Inside, in rooms of gilded frames and mirrors, hang two of Caravaggio's most tender early paintings.

The first is the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, painted in the second half of the 1590s. The Virgin has fallen asleep with the baby in her arms, her head bent over his. Joseph, an old man with tired, bare feet, holds up a sheet of music for an angel who plays the violin, seen from behind, his white wings filling the centre of the picture. The music is real: scholars have identified it as a motet by the Flemish composer Noël Bauldeweyn, set to words from the Song of Songs.

The second, the Penitent Magdalene, shows a young red-haired woman sitting on a low chair, head bowed, her jewels and a broken string of pearls scattered on the floor beside her. A single tear runs down her cheek. And notice: she is the same model as the sleeping Virgin next door, a young courtesan often identified as Anna Bianchini, whose name turns up in the police records of the time.

That was Caravaggio's quiet scandal, and his genius. He put real Romans, people you could pass in the street outside, into the holiest roles, and painted them with such care that their dignity was impossible to deny. Nicolas Poussin is said to have remarked that he came into the world to destroy painting. Within a generation, painters from Utrecht to Seville were copying him.

So the walk ends with its beginning. You followed him from the gate where he arrived, through the cardinal's palace, the churches that made him famous, the alley of his landlady, the street of the killing and the prison by the river, to these two calm pictures of sleep and sorrow, painted when he was still young and almost unknown. Caravaggio lived thirty-eight years, and the city outside these doors still carries his footsteps.