The author analyzes the powerful resonances and the more tenuous connections, also at an unconscious level, between the contemporary British genius's artistic process and that of the legendary art figures who inspired him...
This work is an analysis of the relationship between Francis Bacon and the great artistic tradition of the past. In the wake of the most recent studies that have brought to light the influences of Velasquez, Van Gogh, Soutin, Titian, Picasso, Ingres, Rembrandt, Giacometti, Degas, and Michelangelo, as well as others – surprisingly associated with the most tragic contemporary commentator on existential reality – this book traces the route by which artistic images spring from the recesses of the psyche, and re-emerge distorted and transfigured in Bacon’s paintings.As an alternative to the current trend in philology that interprets Bacon’s oeuvre by setting a historical view of culture against an existential sensibility, the book defines the emerging influence of Michelangelo on the artist, not in terms of the conscious seeking of an intellectual model, but as the result of a profound assimilation and affinity.