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Artist or Maker: Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

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Description: Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velazquez
titled 'Study from Portrait of Innocent X by Velasquez' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
60 1/8 x 47in. (152.5 x 119.5cm.)
Painted in 1959

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Provenance: Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London.
Lady Elizabeth Montagu, London.
Christopher Selmes, London.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1971.

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Exhibited: London, Marlborough Fine Art, Francis Bacon: Paintings 1959-1960, March-April 1960, no. 10 (illustrated).
London, The Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon, May-July 1962, no. 74 (illustrated). This exhibition later travelled to Mannheim, Kunsthalle, July-August 1962, no. 62; Turin, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna, September-October 1962, no. 66; Zurich, Kunsthaus, October-November 1962, no. 61 and Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, January-February 1963, no. 54.
Milan, Palazzo Reale, L'Anima e il Volo Ritratto e Fisiognomica da Leonardo a Bacon, October 1998-March 1999, no. 352.
Valencia, Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Lo Sagrado y lo Profano, December 2003-March 2004, no. 25 (illustrated in colour, p. 80).
Paris, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musee Maillol, Francis Bacon: Le sacré et le profane, April-August 2004.

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Published: Studio, CLX, London, July 1960, (illustrated, p. 29).
R. Alley and J. Rothenstein, Francis Bacon, London 1964, pp. 124-126, no. 156 (illustrated, unpaged).

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Notes: Property from a Distinguished Collection

Francis Bacon believed that Velázquez' portrait of Pope Innocent X was the greatest portrait in the world. It is a sign of his constant thirst for rebellion and his iconoclastic desire to shatter the illusions of the world around him that he repeatedly assaulted Velazquez' original, painting his own tormented visions of the same subject: 'I was haunted by that work, by the reproductions that I saw of it. It's such an extraordinary portrait that I wanted to do something based on it... I was quite overcome by it and I felt compelled to do what I did. I felt overwhelmed by that image' (F. Bacon quoted in interview with M. Archimbaud, reproduced in Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art, W. Seipel (ed.), et al., exh. cat., Vienna and Basel 2004, p. 377). Painted in 1959, Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez marks a triumphant return to that theme after a few years absence. In this painting, Bacon has now synthesised a far more assured and painterly means of depiction and applied it to one of his most iconic themes. This picture is a milestone in the development of what would come to be recognised as his signature style: Bacon has distorted and disturbed the features of the Pope, creating a direct image that provokes an almost physical reaction in the viewer - it goes 'from the eye to the stomach without going through the brain' (F. Bacon, quoted in F. Giacobetti, 'Exclusive Interview with Francis Bacon: I painted to be loved', The Art Newspaper, June 2003). It is a reflection of Bacon's own high opinion of this painting that it is only the second of all the Pope pictures whose title fully and directly refers to the Velázquez original, the other being the one in the Des Moines Art Center.

Bacon felt personally impelled to depict the Popes. The Velázquez portrait clearly struck a deep chord with him: 'I think it is one of the greatest portraits that has ever been made, and I became obsessed with it. I buy book after book with this illustration in it of the Velásquez Pope, because it just haunts me, and it opens up all sorts of feelings and areas of - I was going to say - imagination, even in me' (F. Bacon, 1962, quoted in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, New York 1990, p. 24). Bacon made a concerted effort to buy copy after copy of the Velázquez, many of which were found in his studio, some juxtaposed with pictures of death and Nazis, yet when he had the chance to view the original in Rome, he chose not to do so. Instead, he deliberately limited his knowledge of the work to the small reproductions that he so compulsively acquired. Bacon felt himself almost unwillingly drawn to the picture, to the subject's quiet authority and to the authority of Velázquez' masterly handling. Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez is an attack on those authorities, and others besides. It is an attack on religion, on Catholicism, on power, on his father, on the Old Masters and even on Bacon's own limitations.

Bacon's attack on the Velázquez appears more subtle here than in other paintings of the same subject in that there is no scream. The Pope appears tense and terrified, glancing sideways out into the world of the viewer as though discerning a threat. He is not racked with the overt, tortured pain of some of the earlier versions; instead, there is a quieter and all the more poignant angst clearly visible in the subject's face. When Innocent X was painted in Velázquez' time, The Pope was considered all-powerful and infallible. The original portrait shows a face twisted with condescension, with the 'wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command' reminiscent of Shelley's Ozymandias. Bacon had been influenced not only by Velázquez' painting, but also by a photograph of Pope Pius XII being carried in a procession on a raised platform, a sedia gestatoria. This almost anachronistic image of the Pope still being venerated, dressed and carried around even in the Twentieth Century struck Bacon forcefully: 'It is true, of course, the Pope is unique. He's put in a unique position by being the Pope, and therefore, like in certain great tragedies, he's as though raised onto a dais on which the grandeur of this image can be displayed to the world' (F. Bacon, 1962, quoted in D. Sylvester, op.cit., 1990, p. 26).

Bacon was fascinated by this strange paradoxical position, by this presence of a man revered as so much more than a man. The Popes are wholly infused with the sense of tragedy and, by extension, of hubris that he had pointed out to Sylvester. In Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez, he has removed the veneer of extra powers and mystique that surrounds the pontiff, creating a direct assault on his papal authority. Yet in Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez, the figure appears weak and vulnerable, under imminent attack. He is an imposter, under threat of discovery, dressed in false garbs and painfully aware of the redundancy of his powers and position in the modern world. At the same time, stripping the Pope of his authority in this way allows Bacon all the more dramatically to capture his haunting perception of the human condition, of our everyday vulnerability, of the fragility of life. The fact that it is the anguished gaze of a Pope - and not just of a man - that we see here heightens the sense of existential revelation that makes his greatest paintings so powerful.

Bacon was being ingenuous when he stated that, 'In the Popes it doesn't come from anything to do with religion; it comes from an obsession with the photographs that I know of Velasquez's Pope Innocent X' (F. Bacon, 1962, quoted in D. Sylvester, op.cit., 1990, p. 24). While it is true that he was obsessed with the image, he was also deeply interested in the role of religion, and more importantly of its absence in the modern age of existentialism. The old assurances have been stripped away by a century of insane wars, of mechanisation and crucially of scientific advances. It was this central understanding of man's position in the scheme of things that made a difference between the age in which Velázquez was painting and Bacon was. For Bacon this difference, this destabilised cosmogony with its religious centre torn out, had changed the entire nature and purpose of art in the same way that it had changed man's own perception of his existence:

'I think that man now realizes that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason. I think that, even when Velasquez was painting, even when Rembrandt was painting, in a peculiar way they were still, whatever their attitude to life, slightly conditioned by certain types of religious possibilities, which man now, you could say, has had completely cancelled out for him. Now, of course, man can only attempt to beguile himself for a time by the way he behaves, by prolonging possibly his life through the doctors' (F. Bacon, 1962, quoted in D. Sylvester, op.cit., 1990, pp. 28-29).

Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez is a painting of precisely this process. We see the Pope denuded of his assurances, of his certainty of divine powers and divine salvation. Stripped of the old certainties of life, we perceive instead the ugly realities of existence. In Bacon's Pope, we see a key player, or victim, transported from Artaud's 'theatre of cruelty'. It is for this reason that in some of Bacon's other depictions of the Pope, they are shown screaming. They have been forced into revelation, have been robbed of the comforting curtain of their beliefs, and are left instead to face the ordeal of being 'an accident... a completely futile being'. In this sense, Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez harnesses the existential angst of modern existence. There may be no scream, yet still we bear witness to what Bacon referred to as 'The whole coagulation of pain, despair...' (F. Bacon quoted in D. Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, London 1994, p. 106).

When discussing the Popes with Bacon, David Sylvester pointed out that they could be an attack on his father, the Italian word for Pope being Papa. This adds to the idea of personal anguish fuelling the painting. Another target of Bacon's attack, though, was Velázquez himself. For in imitating his work, Bacon was also laying siege to his superiority. The strange abuse of what he considered the greatest portrait in the world reveals a paradoxical mixture of reverence and irreverence. This is at once a homage and an insult. Just as Duchamp drew a moustache on the Mona Lisa, Bacon has taken a timeless masterpiece and twisted it to his own purposes. In this, he is in part flexing his own new-found artistic muscles. For Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez is filled with a new painterly quality that had only begun to feature in Bacon's works over the previous couple of years. It was during this time that he had been creating pictures that were after, or tributes to, Van Gogh. And it was through his interest in Van Gogh, in expressionistic brushwork, and above all in Soutine that he began to adapt a new means of painting. Gone are the thin and stretched oils of his earlier works, replaced instead by the sumptuous, liquid-like swirls that make up the muddied pool of Innocent X's face. Where Bacon's figures had seemed skeleton-like and emaciated in earlier years, there is now a meatiness, an interest in flesh, that heightens the sense of mortality and of decay in the Pope's face.

The theme of Velázquez' portrait had first appeared in 1949, in Head VI, which fused the features of the Pope with those of the shot woman in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. Other such cross-germinations and changes feature in almost all the Popes. By contrast, the vortex-like rendering of the face in Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez is the only significant divergence from the original. In fact, of all the oils that Bacon created on this theme, Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez remains the truest to its source. The features of the Pope, despite being distorted and smeared, remain highly recognisable, down even to the sideways glance. Bacon has changed the colour of the background, replacing the plush claret-coloured velvet of the original with the green that would form the backgrounds of almost all his paintings of this period. In Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez, this restraint in dealing with the Velázquez shows a Bacon more at ease with painting, at ease with the legacy of his predecessor. It also places the meat-like, distorted features of the Pope firmly at the centre of the work. In this simple way, Innocent X's shimmering face is the indisputable focus of the entire painting, allowing Bacon to explore what he termed, 'sophisticated simplicity...You have to abbreviate into intensity' (F. Bacon, 1982-84, quoted in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, New York 1990, p. 176).

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