STUDY FOR A PORTRAIT OF POPE INNOCENT X, 1989

  • Francis Bacon, Study for a Portrait of Pope Innocent X after Velazquez, 1989

    Study for Portrait of Pope Innocent X after Velázquez, 1989

    Lithograph in colours on Arches, 95.3 x 69.2cm

    ©The Estate of Francis Bacon

     

    Study for a Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1989) revisits one of Francis Bacon’s most enduring and iconic subjects, the image of Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650). Bacon’s fascination with the papal figure stretched across decades, with the 1989 version standing as a late meditation on power, mortality, and the collapse of grandeur.
     
    In this work, Bacon strips away the authority of the original Baroque portrait, replacing dignity with distortion. The pope, once a symbol of divine control, becomes a figure of vulnerability, seated in isolation, suspended in a field of dark, luminous colour. By the time of this version, Bacon’s technique had become more restrained, his brushwork tighter, and his compositions more minimal, yet the psychological force remains.
     
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  • “I’ve always been very moved by the Popes, because I think they are men who have been trapped by their own power.”

     

    – Francis Bacon

    For Bacon, the pope represented both power and confinement, a man trapped by his own authority, imprisoned in a role he cannot escape. Across more than forty variations of the theme, Bacon stripped away the trappings of grandeur: the throne, the robes, and the calm dignity of Velázquez’s original. What remained was vulnerability, the raw, human presence behind the façade of control.