UNTITLED (POPE), 1954

  • POPE,c. 1953, Francis Bacon

    POPE,c. 1953

    Oil on canvas, 152.3 x 94 cm

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

    Created during the height of Francis Bacon’s obsession with papal imagery, Pope (c. 1953) continues his reinterpretation of Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. The figure appears isolated against a dark, shallow background, the familiar trappings of power replaced by a sense of claustrophobic despair. Bacon’s vigorous brushwork dissolves the robe and face into smears of paint, transforming authority into vulnerability. The spectral tones and blurred contours make the Pope appear as if caught between material form and psychic collapse.
     
    In this work, Bacon’s recurring themes, fear, isolation, and the disintegration of identity, reach a kind of visual shorthand. The Pope is no longer a portrait of a man, but a universal emblem of human fragility, screaming not in defiance but in recognition. The canvas captures the moment power and mortality converge, leaving only the trace of anguish suspended in paint.

  • If I didn’t have to live, I’d never let any of it out.

    - Francis Bacon

    Francis Bacon’s Popes are among the most recognisable and unsettling images in modern art. Across countless variations, he reimagined the authority of Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X as something fragile and human. The papal figure, once a symbol of divine power, becomes a man imprisoned within his own grandeur, screaming, dissolving, or vanishing into streaks of colour. Bacon’s fascination with the image lay in its contradictions: control and collapse, faith and doubt, flesh and spirit.