C‘he is an artist who has shown like few others the madness of power, and the violence that man suffers: he is Francis Bacon. He visits Rome and, in a room of the Doria Pamphilj Gallery, admires the most beautiful portrait in the world: the portrait of Pope Innocent X, which Diego Velázquez painted in 1649during his second Roman stay. And he is deeply shaken by it.
Velázquez’s painting is disturbing: Innocent’s face pierces with its sulphurous ambiguity. The red, indistinct background vibrates, and the diabolical shadow of the throne stands out above it. Velázquez’s painting seems breathy, such is its naturalness, and it makes the Pontiff so alive and speaking. The Pope is immobile and immobilized on his throne, as if he were a prisoner of the power he expresses.
A tragic, Shakespearean painting, which does not escape the young, no longer young, Bacon. And from which he can no longer escape, forced by a force greater than him to reproduce it infinite times, in a famous series of Studies created by Bacon between 1950 and the first years of the following decade, for a total of 45 paintings.
Bacon distances himself from Velázquez’s red and white, preferring purple. The Spanish painter’s red background becomes black which highlights the shapes, as if the shadow of the throne had devoured Velázquez’s curtains. The scream of the pope, the gnashing pope, the monstrous pope, the aggressive pope: they are all variants of a ferocious animal, imagined closed in a cage which is Bacon’s metamorphosis of the throne in Velázquez’s painting.
Bacon identifies the contradiction that inhabits Velázquez’s Innocentreinterprets it, almost mindful of the lesson ofI scream by Munch. Bacon painted a humanity terrified of the greatest danger: itself. He moved the contradiction that inhabited the figure of Innocent into the heart of contemporary man. Bacon stripped the Popes until they became men, in their violence and their misery.
“Portrait of Pope Innocent X” by Pietro Martire Neri (1591-1661). Private collection.
In this sense, Bacon’s work represents one of the last expressions of humanism, because he does not give up the comparison with man, with his conscience, with his disturbance; it does not go beyond man, but is within man, in his most abysmal depths. I too, like Bacon, have been obsessed withInnocent by Diego Velázquez. For many years I lived in Innocent X’s house in Piazza Navona, Rome, until it burned down. It was a sumptuous apartment, on the main floor of a building which, on the less prestigious floor, had hosted Silvio Berlusconi.
I also happened to buy, with my mother’s complicity, the Villa called Maidalchinanear Viterbo (currently in the Cavallini Sgarbi Foundation), including a small church that we restored with the architect Cesarini, thanks to the contribution of Intesa Sanpaolo, encouraged by the Lazio Region and which will soon be open to visitors together with the park.
The Villa, whose roof I had rebuilt – and which contains frescoes which I then attributed to the Cavalier d’Arpino, Caravaggio’s teacher in his early Roman years – it was owned by the wife of Pope Innocent X’s brother, Olimpia Maidalchini, known as Pimpaccia (of which I also have a bare-breasted bust). If Innocent’s impervious character is well known, Olimpia’s unscrupulousness is less so: it was she who successfully led the electoral campaign of the future pontiff and to open in San Martino al Cimino, a wonderful village in Tuscia, a hospice for old Roman prostitutes, from whom she, Olimpia, had sucked every profit to finance the rise of Innocent
And it is said that, when one was received by the Pope, she appeared first on the door axis, and only to her left was the Pontiff.. Olympias was the expression of an archetypal female power, whose Mephistophelian audacity surpassed that of Innocent. Finally, always pursued by the specter of Velázquez’s Innocent, I purchased a copy of his painting, but not just any copy: it was the work of a painter friend of his, who followed him on his travels, Pietro Martire Neriborn in Cremona.
Neri’s Innocent in it I cannot help but feel, and be moved by, the breath, the breath of the Spanish painter. This is why I can deeply understand Francis Bacon’s Studies on Velázquez, because I was a victim of his same spell. I lived in the same obsession, chasing it for a lifetime (or being chased by it), whereas he, Bacon, transformed it into a masterpiece of painting of all time. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I believe in the life-giving and lethal power of Diego Velázquez.
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