![]() We will find that a uniquely Baroque strategy was used by this distinctly bohemian artist to remake an image of Velázquez's Portrait of Innocent X for purposes that were, to his satisfaction, never realized. With the details in front of us, we will work out or unfold the problem Bacon set for himself and the significance of this problem for him and for painting in general. To this end, we will look carefully at the series of popes, seventeen paintings in all, that Bacon painted between 19 of which Study After Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), the so-called Des Moines Pope, in the most well-known.3 We will delineate, in this most concentrated series of paintings on this theme, the elements brought together in them and Bacon's manner of plying these elements onto one another to make a complete work. We are especially interested to know how Innocent X, the portrait and its subject, figure in the setting of this challenge. It is the exact nature of the problem for Bacon that we want to explore here, the way these images of popes pose the problem for Bacon but also fix it in a fast and ready form. What was Bacon trying to accomplish in all of these images? What problem or question or challenge did Portrait of Innocent X pose for him? Was it, in fact, a problem he never expected to solve, a question he hoped never to answer, a challenge set not by Velázquez's painting but by painting itself, a problem he transferred to other subjects, continuing to produce solutions that would never completely satisfy him? It is not controversial to say painting poses a problem, for the artist and the viewer. In fact, he counted all of his paintings of popes failures, and not only or obviously because they failed to resemble their inspiration.2 Bacon painted at least forty-five popes (there is no exact count of how many he destroyed), mostly modeled on the Velázquez portrait, beginning with Head VI (1949) and culminating in Study for Red Pope (1971), a painting said to follow closely the Study from 1962. Bacon would not have thought the success of his Study should depend on its resembling the Velázquez. It was a record sale for the artist, Francis Bacon, who dies thirty years after completing the work.1 The painting was thought to be valuable because, of all the popes Bacon painted, it most resembled the inspiration for the long series of paintings Bacon executed on this theme, Diego Velázquez's haunting Painting of Innocent X (1650). The painting, held in a private collection for over thirty years, had never appeared as auction before. In July 2007, Study from Innocent X (1962) sold at Sotheby's to an anonymous bidder for over $52 million. By comparing old concepts of the picturesque movement effect with emerging image technologies such as ‘virtual reality' this paper will suggest that some of the inventions that seem most contemporary return us to questions that lie at the origins of modernity. At present blockbuster cinema and new forms of digital animated images are eroding the distinction between still and moving images, and with that ‘movement’ as a telos for culture. While building technology means that buildings today have more capacity for movement than ever before, the converse seems to be the case in image technology. To a large extent the model for architecture was cinema, a technology that brought life to the still image Both the spatio-visual properties of cinema and its popularity seemed to make it the partner to architecture. A concept of movement was deeply embedded in the culture of the twentieth century, and no more so than in architecture where it was variously considered a condition or an aim of modern being.
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