Figure with Meat

Permeated by anguished visions of humanity, Francis Bacon’s paintings embody the existential ethos of the postwar era. In his powerful, nihilistic works, tormented and deformed figures become players in dark, unresolved dramas. Bacon often referred in his paintings to the history of art, interpreting borrowed images through his own bleak mentality. Figure with Meat is part of a now-famous series he devoted to Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (c. 1650; Galleria Doria-Pamphilj, Rome). Here he transformed the Spanish Baroque artist’s iconic portrayal of papal authority into a nightmarish image, in which the blurred figure of the pope, seen as if through a veil, seems trapped in a glass-box torture chamber, his mouth open in a silent scream. Instead of the noble drapery that frames Velázquez’s pope, Bacon is flanked by two sides of beef, quoting the work of seventeenth-century Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn and twentieth-century Russian artist Chaim Soutine, both of whom painted brutal and haunting images of raw meat. Framed by the carcass, Bacon’s pope can be seen alternately as a depraved butcher, or as much a victim as the slaughtered animal hanging behind him.