Ritratto di papa Innocenzo X

Velázquez painted this in Rome in 1650, on a trip to buy art for the Spanish king, and he faced one of the most powerful men in Europe, Pope Innocent X. He didn't flatter him. The pope's face is flushed and wary, the eyes sharp and suspicious, the whole man wrapped in reds so alive they almost hum. The story goes that when Innocent saw it he said only, it's too true, too true, though scholars doubt the line is real. What isn't in doubt is how the picture haunted later painters. Three centuries on, Francis Bacon used it as the base for dozens of canvases in which the same pope sits screaming behind a cage of vertical strokes. Bacon said he never went to see the original, here in the Doria Pamphilj palace, where it still hangs in a small room built around it.