Hints and tips:
...There’s a terrific sense of being in the presence of the wily old pontiff, known as the “Warrior Pope”....
...These stellar paintings — Raphael’s foundational power portrait “Pope Julius II” (1511); Rubens’ tumultuous “Rape of the Sabine Women” (c1635-40); Claude’s “Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba...
...Think of the great English poets, the illiterate agricultural worker John Clare, the hunchback ostracised Catholic Alexander Pope, the office worker who wrote down the expense of every cup of coffee — that...
...uneasy “Pope Paul III and His Grandsons”, capturing the power play between the elderly pontiff and the dissatisfied youths....
...Another is Francis Bacon’s “Study for a Pope VI”, last of six depictions following Velázquez in an important 1961 series....
...At an early exhibition outraged visitors even tried to make the supine pope stand up....
...The BBC’s other literary offering this week is Lady Boss (October 15), a documentary about bonkbuster novelist Jackie Collins....
...Another cardinal, Giulio Rospigliosi, poet, librettist for the Barberini theatre and later Pope Clement IX, commissioned “A Dance to the Music of Time” (1634-36), and dictated its iconography of dance as...
...“Heads” 1-VI (1948-49) evolve from the animal-like to the first iconic, caged, screaming purple-robed Pope, face reduced to an open mouth, above which swings again the mocking phallic tassel....
...It also established an iconography of power, from Velázquez’s pope to Francis Bacon’s. Raphael is an inherently secular artist, engrossed in the world, at ease with the rulers of his day....
...He fled to Dieppe, met publisher-pornographer Leonard Smithers and, aged 23, retreated to history: refined filigree illustrations for Pope’s “Rape of the Lock”, inspired by “dreadfully depraved” 18th-century...
...In “Study of Red Pope” here, Bacon adds the thuggish face of George Dyer, his lover....
...“Figures in a Landscape” (c1956) merges crouching nudes with a photographic image, a cameraman mauled by a lion in Africa, within a geometric, transparent golden throne as in Bacon’s screaming pope paintings...
...Francis Bacon’s caged popes screaming on their thrones spring to mind, but this chair’s occupant is a black rubber hose activated every few minutes to whip the cage in a frenzy, hissing and scratching the...
...Jackie Shemesh’s eloquent lighting transforms Max Johns’ simple, circular set into a river, a sports arena and a distant universe....
...Marsyas’s wide, screaming mouth called to mind Francis Bacon’s popes....
...In a gallery entitled “La Vérité Crainte”, two Bacon screaming popes imprisoned on their thrones, the privately owned “Study after Velázquez” and MoMA’s theatrical gold-encased “Study for Portrait VII”,...
...Mary in deep blue is enthroned under a baldachin with Emperor Maximilian I, in red, and the gold-robed Pope — temporal and religious powers united — kneeling either side; an angel plays the lute — a direct...
...These range from Bacon’s raw, urgent, silken screaming Pope (“Study after Velázquez”) and howling animal stand-ins for psychological agony “Dog” and “Study of a Baboon” in the early 1950s, to Freud’s 1990s...
...The acquisition in 1728 by August II the Strong of works from Cardinal Albani, esteemed connoisseur but also a gambler in need of cash, drove Pope Clement XII to buy the rest of Albani’s collection....
...In 1515 Pope Leo appointed his cousin Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici as archbishop of Narbonne. Giulio refused to visit Narbonne, instead endowing an altarpiece....
...In 1517 “a monk in a backwater town at the edge of Germany took on the most powerful men in Europe — the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope — and he won.”...
...That’s ahead of Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama, though behind Jackie Chan....
...When Sergei Shchukin began buying up Matisses and Picassos in 1900s Paris, a patron emerged of a power and influence not seen since Renaissance princes and popes....
...abject form in a space frame leaking a greenish shadow, never shown before; a little-known snarling “Head”, compressed by tight collar and tie and confined in a cage; and the famous “Head VI”, a screaming Pope...
International Edition