The Doria Pamphilj Gallery is the public face of the collection of the Roman aristocratic Doria Pamphili family, whose lineage goes back approximately eight hundred years.

The family blood descends through a line of princes of a variety of communities in the "Holy Roman Empire," as well as that of Pope Innocent X. Pope Innocent X is also the subject of the Gallery's most famous asset, the Velazquez portrait. The gallery, which includes works of Caravaggio, Tintoretto, and Brueghel, hosts regular concerts, helping to build connections between music and visual art.

Between 1731 and 1734, Prince Camilo Pamphilj Jr. commissioned the Baroque architect Gabriele Valvassori to reconstruct and update the largest building of the Palazzo of the House of Doria Pamphili, located on Via del Corso in Rome. Valvassori is famous for his ornate, detailed, and imposing churches, including the Santa Maria dell'Orto, featured in the 1945 neorealist film Roma città aperta by Roberto Rossellini. The Doria Pamphilj archive preserves a 1767 document displaying the arrangement of the paintings, which allows the Gallery to promote its atmosphere as analogous to that of the 18th century.

Frank Pogson Doria Pamphilj, who married Orietta, the last princess by indirect descent of the House of Doria Pamphili, and who, by the British legal device of the deed poll, added her name to his, was raised Anglican in the United Kingdom, but eventually grew fascinated with Catholicism. This common interest initially connected him with the princess, who grew up in the Palazzo which includes the gallery, one of the three largest palaces in Rome, with over 1,000 rooms. In the 1950s, Pogson rewired and refloored the gallery, and "broke with tradition and had the dust sheets taken off the palace's private apartments, opening them up to the public for the first time."

Opening the apartments to the public, radical or not, was an effective way of promoting the lineage of the family that spared no expense to narrate its history: at the construction of the gallery, artists used abstract decorative patterns for most of the ceiling space, but "the frescoes in the second wing illustrating the Labors of Hercules make reference to Pamphilj genealogies that traced the family's descent from the mythical hero."