THE PRINCE’S HALL

The ‘Painted Drawing Room’

Gaspard Dughet (Rome 1615 – 1675)

Guillaume Courtois, Guglielmo Cortese aka the Borgognone (Saint Hippolyte 1626 – Rome 1679)

In the summer of 1658, Camillo Pamphilj summoned Gaspard Dughet to Valmontone to decorate the long narrow hall, for which the artist was sure to find an innovative and convincing solution.

Dughet, considered one of the leading experts in 17th-century landscape painting, chose to evoke the vision of a loggia overlooking the countryside along the walls, structured on a system of pairs of columns resting on a high faux-marble base, decorated in monochrome with mythological stories. Like a grand scenographic set, natural backdrops with foliage and flowers and mountainous backdrops with harsh and austere contours, in which the human figure is completely absent, unfold in the hall. All of this was done with the aim of creating the illusion of a real landscape, of perspective breaking through to the external space that surrounded the palace at the time and from which the artist presumably drew inspiration, arousing amazement and wonder in the eye of the spectator.

Around the perimeter of the vault there is a terrace with a parapet and railings from which a young man in a feathered hat and groups of ladies look out – one of whom has been identified as Flaminia Pamphilj, daughter of Prince Camillo. The so-called ‘painted drawing room’, as mentioned in the inventories of the palace, was frescoed by Gaspard Dughet with the collaboration of his friend Guglielmo Cortese, to whose hand we are indebted for the family portraits. In the centre of the vault is the coat of arms of Camillo Pamphilj and his wife, Olimpia Aldobrandini. The two artists chose a decorative system inspired by that of the Gallery of Alexander VII in the Quirinale, painted only a few years earlier under the direction of the great Pietro da Cortona, and in which Dughet and Cortese were also involved.

The Prince’s Hall was intended for convivial purposes and for the musical and theatrical entertainment of guests who, especially in summer, flocked to the Valmontone fiefdom in large numbers, where they were received in an atmosphere of great pomp.

From the early 1990s onwards, the paintings have been subjected to several restorations, the most recent of which was carried out in 2014 and realised thanks to funding from the Ministry of Culture.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the beauty of the still well-preserved paintings in the Prince’s Hall continued to be a source of great charm for the spectator. Ellis Cornelia Knight, an English traveller and author of the ‘Description of Latium’, after visiting Valmontone and the palace, wrote about the Hall: ‘The colouring of this room is so fresh and harmonious, the idea so happy, and the whole so well painted, that it impresses the traveller as one of the most delightful things they have ever seen’.