Henry James, among the founders of English literature between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the summer of the 1878 publishes Daisy Miller, a romance almost fully set in Rome, among whose pages is mentioned Palazzo Doria Pamphilj.
Daisy Miller is the story of an American girl, Daisy, who, upon arriving in Europe, remains fascinated by the old continent and the good society to which she strongly desires to belong, but fails.
As anticipated, the novel, although starting in Scotland, develops for the most part in Rome where Daisy goes with her mother, her younger brother and Mr. Winterbourne, her suitor.
In Rome, Daisy visits Palazzo Doria Pamphilij as well as Mr. Winterbourne . Here James writes:
(….) One day on the Corso he met a friend, a tourist like him, who had just left Palazzo Doria, where he had strolled through the beautiful Gallery. His friend spoke for a moment about Velasquez’s superb portrait of Innocent X
The painting mentioned by James is by Velasquez, it is an artwork created on commission of the Pope himself.
Innocenzo X portrait is still now kept in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, in the same palce where Henry James describes it, admired by it characters.
Furthermore, according to a legend surrounding the painting, before commissioning it from Velasquez the Pope wanted to be sure of his talent and asked the artist to demonstrate his skills to him: so Velasquez showed him a portrait he had just completed, the portrait of his servant, Juan de Pareja.
Convinced of Velasquez‘s pictorial talent, the Pope eventually commissioned the artwork from him.
