Domenichino, "Landscape with Ford" at the Doria Pamphilj Gallery

This is not one of the top tourist highlights of the Doria Pamphilj Gallery -- people fly by this little painting by Domenichino on the way to Valesquez's piercing portrait of Innocent X, or Caravaggio's Rest on the Flight to Egypt.  But I was taken by the analysis of the painting offered by Jonathan Doria Pamphilj, the latest in the line of the family to own this massive palazzo and collection, which dates back some 400 years.

Like Wallace Steven's poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,  the painting's foreground lays before us the "beauty of inflections" and the "beauty of innuendoes," the joyous now of the pair crossing the ford, the anticipation of the passage by the family on the right, and the looking-back of the woman on the other side, for whom the experience is now becoming memory, a form of "innuendo."