STUDY FOR A POPE I

  • STUDY FOR A POPE I, 1961, Francis Bacon

    STUDY FOR A POPE I, 1961

    Oil on canvas, 152 x 119 cm

    ©The Estate of Francis Bacon, image reproduced for educational purposes only. 

    Painted in 1961, Study for a Pope I belongs to Francis Bacon’s long and obsessive engagement with the image of the Pope, inspired by Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. In this work, the familiar trappings of papal authority are stripped to their psychological core. The figure appears seated yet dissolving, caught in a haze of purple and grey brushstrokes that blur the boundaries between flesh and fabric. The mouth, half-open, suggests both speech and scream, a recurring motif that turns the image of religious power into one of existential exposure.
     
    Bacon’s use of vertical strokes, resembling veils or cages, creates a sense of imprisonment. The Pope seems confined not just by space but by his own presence, trapped within an atmosphere of tension and despair. The colour palette, cooler and more subdued than his earlier works from the 1950s, gives the painting a chilling restraint. It is less about outward horror and more about the silent weight of inner collapse, the quiet terror that power cannot protect from decay or doubt.

  • The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

    - Francis Bacon

    By the early 1960s, Bacon’s Papal studies had evolved into meditations on mortality and control. Study for a Pope I reflects an artist confronting the limits of form and faith, reworking a subject that had become a mirror for his own fears and ambitions. This Pope is neither a man nor an icon, but a presence suspended between being and dissolution, Bacon’s vision of authority reduced to its most human and haunted state.