Francis Bacon

Since I started doing this project I remembered a painting that was hanging on my sister’s room wall. I remember it since my childhood. It looks like a scene from a horror movie, but on the other hand it always looked interesting to me and used to stare at it for hours. It is a portrait of pope by Francis Bacon.

Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pop Innocent X 1953, Francis Bacon

The work shows a distorted version of the Portrait of Innocent X painted by Spanish artist Diego Velázquez in 1650. The work is one of a series of over 45 variants, Bacon worked on his pope paintings for over twenty years.

The real reason behind this painting is unknown, however people have pored over the paintings and the possible inspirations behind them ever since Bacon painted them. One of the interpretations say that the screaming mouth, isolated from other facial features and divorced from any narrative context, suggests existential agony. The pathos of human vulnerability and loss of faith or conviction are accentuated by the precisely rendered space frames in many Bacon images of popes.

In Bacon's version of Velázquez's masterpiece, the Pope is shown screaming yet his voice is "silenced" by the enclosing drapes and dark rich colours. This reminds me of sleep paralysis and the feeling when you try to scream but you can’t.

It also looks like the pope is seeing something terrible that made him shout, but other people can't see. The person that experience sleep paralysis is the only one that can see what is happening, even if there were more people in the room they could not see anything.