The Anxiety of the Sight and the Cruelty of Feeling in F. Bacons Picture «portrait of Pope Innocent X» (Study №7)

Abstract

The article will consider the problem of the concept of physicality in the "spirit of the times". The time that will be discussed is commonly called modernity and post-modernity, a prominent representative of which is the artist Francis Bacon. Such a traditional problem of philosophical thought as the correlation of the human soul and body, in the interpretation of Francis Bacon, acquires a completely new discourse. Francis Bacon is an artist who thinks in philosophical categories in line with the problems of human existence as such. Human existence should arrive in an equilibrium correlation of categories: space, time and life, death. The narrative of the works of F. Bacon is the irony of human existence that breaks through pain and screaming. Through the observation of material signs - corporeality and their essence – the spiritual, Francis Bacon proposes to understand the question of the correlation of the corporeal and the spiritual, a discourse in the spirit of postmodernism. By means of the analysis of the painting "Portrait of Pope Innocent X" (etude No. 7), the concept of the corporeal as a structure is revealed, which should be perceived and understood in the context of the totality: the body as an individual, the body as an artificial construct and the body as a socio-cultural construct. Physicality as the sum of the three toposes of the body. The rejection of a stable, uniform understanding of the corporeal and the perception of its image as a stream that cannot be fixed in principle, allows us to identify the ideological program of the representative in its new senses. The ceremonial portrait of Pope Innocent X in the interpretation of Diego Velasquez is the essence of the bodily category, the portrait of Francis Bacon is the splitting of the bodily and the essence of the spiritual category. This is a discourse about a dichotomy, the basis of which is the splitting of subjectivity - the separation of the symbolic plane of corporeality from physical reality.