Скачать или смотреть 🇻🇦 Study for Velázquez Pope II by Francis Bacon (Masterpiece no. 56)

Before you stands Study for Velázquez Pope II, painted by Francis Bacon in 1961, a reworking of Velázquez’s 1650 Portrait of Innocent X, which he once called “one of the greatest paintings in the world.”
Let’s turn this into a brief game—observe carefully, and if you have time later, write in the comments what you feel differs most between Bacon’s vision and the original.
Here, the Pope sits alone in a void of black, his throne stripped of ornament, his world emptied of colour.
Bacon, who knew the masterpiece only through photographs, transformed its regal stillness into a meditation on isolation and doubt.
His brush pulls the figure inward, as if the weight of the robe and the darkness behind it were closing in.
The mouth is shut, not in peace but in restraint, as though silence itself were a final act of control.
When you look into those eyes, you do not meet authority—you meet the moment a man holds himself together beneath the pressure of his own belief.