Sound Project - RESEARCH

22:58 Unknown 1 Comments

My sound project is based on the portrait of Pope Innocent X, is an oil on canvas portrait by the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. Pope Innocent X was born at Rome, 6 May, 1574; died there, 7 January, 1655. His parents were Camillo Pamfili and Flaminia de Bubalis. The Pamfili resided originally at Gubbio, in Umbria, but came to Rome during the pontificate of Innocent VIII. [1]

I chose Francis Bacon's most famous paintings inspired by Velasquez's Pope Innocent X portrait. [2]
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 of the Velázquez painting which Bacon executed throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. The picture was described by Gilles Deleuze as an example of creative re-interpretation of the classical. [3]

Diego Velazquez's painting on the left and Francis Bacon's on the right.

The insertion subverts the encapsulation of power and self-assurance projected by Velázquez. 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, which make the figures register as ‘enclosed in the wretched glass capsule of the human individual’, to cite the evocative phrase used by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), one of Bacon’s favourite books.[2]

I was more into the Popes biography, but it seemed really secret. Therefore I choose to find out why Francis Bacon wanted to show him screaming, what was the reason and is this is somehow interacting with his sexuality?

Bacon’s obsessive reworking of the papal theme suggests that it may have possessed further significance and perhaps psychological charge for the artist in relation to his sexuality. It has been remarked that the Pope in official garb is in a sense the ultimate drag queen, or less literally that depictions of the Holy Father, known in Italy as ‘il Papa’, may encapsulate Bacon’s traumatic feelings about his own father. The latter was a conventional, inflexible military man to whom the teenage Bacon had felt sexually attracted, as he recalled many years later, but who brutally admonished and rejected him when he discovered his son’s homosexual inclinations. Such speculations about the possible ‘subconscious’ content of the pope pictures involve perhaps a rather crude application of the methods of Freudian psychoanalysis. Once again it is neither altogether possible nor helpful to pin Bacon down.

[1] http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08020b.htm
[2] http://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2013/february/08/the-truth-behind-francis-bacons-screaming-popes/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Study_after_Vel%C3%A1zquez%27s_Portrait_of_Pope_Innocent_X

1 comment:

  1. aparisio29 April 2016 at 12:54

    Hi Arturs I can tell that the above interpretation of Francis Bacon's artwork is clearly not your own from the use and style of writing. It is good that you are researching authoritative interpretations but you need to sum up in your own words. To present somebody else's writing without attribution is plagiarism. You must put in quote marks and attribute the quote directly to the writer....... Anne

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