Francis Bacon-Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X

Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X
Date: 1953
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 153 cm × 118 cm (60 in × 46 in)
Collection: Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa

This work is one of a series of over 45 variants of the Velázquez’s 'Portrait of Pope Innocent X' of 1650. Francis Bacon painted them throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. The piece  contains strong influences from art and photography. Bacon stated that he revisited the subject of Popes as "an excuse to use these colours, and you can't give ordinary clothes that purple colour without getting into a sort of false fauve manner" and that he was fascinated by the seemingly "isolated position" of the Pope in Velázquez’s portrait. This painting is commonly referred to as 'The Screaming Pope' and is considered to be Bacon’s masterpiece. It was described by Gilles Deleuze as an example of creative re-interpretation of the classical. Bacon never saw Velázquez’s original painting and so had to work from reproductions. He also used other photographic sources inspire his 1953 version. His inspiration to create these variations on a past work was likely Picasso as Bacon held him in very high regard; "Picasso is the reason why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the wish to paint". Picasso had reinterpreted works by Grünewald, Delacroix, Manet, Gauguin and Velázquez himself.

Still from Sergei Einstein's 1925
silent film "The Battleship Potemkin"

The Pope’s face was modelled on a still from 'The Battleship Potemkin' (1925), a silent black and white film by Sergei Eisenstein in which an old woman was shot mid-scream during a blood bath mutiny. The photograph depicts a wounded nurse screaming open mouthed with broken glasses half falling off her blood stained face. This image fascinated Bacon who always kept a copy of it in his studio.