Francis Bacon: Because I think it's one of the greatest portraits that has ever been made, and because I became obsessed by it. I buy book after book with this illustration in it of the Velazquez's Pope, because it just haunts me, and it opens up all sorts of feelings and areas of - I was going to say - imagination, even, in me.
Francis Bacon - Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) | Velazquez - Pope Innocent X (1650)
"Any poem, novel, play, painting, musical composition worth meeting says to us: "change your life." The voice of intelligible form, of the needs of direct address from which such forms springs, asks:
"What do you feel, what do you think of the possibilities of life, of the alternative shapes of being which are implicit in your experience of me, in our encounter?"
The indiscretion of serious art and literature and music is total.
It queries the last privacies of our existence."
George Steiner - Real Presences (sublinhados meus)
