Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X

A ghostly figure sits trapped on a golden throne, his mouth wrenched open in a scream that seems to echo through the darkness around him. Francis Bacon painted this haunting image in 1953, borrowing the pose from a famous portrait of Pope Innocent X by the Spanish master Diego Velázquez. The original showed a calm and commanding ruler, but Bacon turned that dignity inside out. His pope appears to be dissolving, his purple robes and pale face blurred behind vertical streaks of dark paint that fall like curtains or the bars of a cage.

Bacon stood among the most important British artists of the twentieth century, famous for images of the human body that unsettle rather than soothe. Curiously, he claimed he never saw the Velázquez painting for himself, even during a trip to Rome where it hangs. He preferred working from photographs and reproductions. The gaping mouth is thought to come from a scene in the silent film Battleship Potemkin, where a wounded woman shrieks in terror. This canvas belongs to a whole series of "screaming popes" that Bacon painted, each one wrestling with fear, loneliness, and the raw edges of human experience.

Comfortable it is not, and Bacon meant it that way. He wanted his work to strike people deep in the gut instead of merely pleasing the eye, and this howling figure has lingered in the memory of viewers ever since.