Francis Bacon (Dublin, 1909 – Madrid, 1992), one of the greatest Irish painters of the second half of the twentieth century, is a striking example of an artist whose personal story is closely linked to his work, in that he used painting as a means of expressing his anxieties. Despite an outgoing temperament devoted to amusements and friendships, Bacon harbored dark and conflicting feelings within himself because of the difficulties he experienced in his childhood and adolescence. His paintings are, in fact, characterized by deliberately disturbing and disturbing images, in which the human figure is distorted or depicted as anthropomorphic, often in the act of screaming, and is placed in bare, lonely rooms.

In the last years of his life, despite many painful bereavements, Bacon became aware of the need to live more lightly and introduced softer hues into his works, which he continued to make until late in life. He had a visceral relationship with art, leading him to destroy his own works when deemed unworthy or to prevent him from seeing live works by other painters whom he deeply loved. Such as Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X , the painting on which he did a reworking that is one of the works for which he is still best known and which he did not want to admire until he was elderly.