Study for Portrait of Pope Innocent X after Velázquez by Francis Bacon returns to the image that defined his reputation more than any other — the screaming pope, a figure he returned to obsessively across four decades and never fully exhausted.

The source was Diego Velázquez's 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X, now in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj in Rome. Bacon knew it only through a black and white reproduction — he kept it pinned to the walls of his Reece Mews studio for years and refused, famously, ever to see the original in person, fearing it would overwhelm what he had already made from it. That distance was productive. What Bacon was working with was not Velázquez's painting but his own idea of it — a mediation of a mediation, the image already stripped of colour and scale before he touched it.

He began the pope series in earnest in the early 1950s with the Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X of 1953 — now one of the most reproduced paintings of the twentieth century — and returned to the subject repeatedly through the 1950s and into the 1960s. The variations are extraordinary in their range. Some popes scream with open mouths behind vertical lines that function simultaneously as cage bars and motion blur. Some are dissolved almost entirely into tonal fields of grey and purple. Some sit in composed horror, the distortion operating beneath the surface of the face rather than erupting through it. What connects them is the cage — the enclosing structure of chair, curtain, and framing lines that holds the figure in place whilst making its entrapment the subject of the image.

The theological dimension was not incidental. Bacon was a committed atheist raised in a strictly Anglican household who had developed a lifelong contempt for institutional religion. His popes do not suffer toward redemption — they scream into a void that offers nothing in return. Where Christian iconography had always presented suffering as the threshold of salvation, Bacon's papal figures encounter only the suffering itself, stripped of consolation or meaning. The pope — the supreme figure of spiritual authority in Western culture — becomes in Bacon's hands the supreme figure of existential exposure, the man who speaks for God rendered speechless by the condition of being human.

By the time this lithograph was made in 1989, Bacon was in his late seventies and had been living with the papal motif for nearly forty years. The violent open-mouthed distortions of the early series had given way to something more compressed and structural — the figure still caged, still under pressure, but the scream quieter and more inward, the horror absorbed into the geometry of the composition rather than erupting through the face.

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