Velazquez Paints Innocent X

1651

In Rome on his second visit, Diego Velazquez painted the scowling, red-faced Pope Innocent X seated in his vestments. The pope himself said it was troppo vero, too true, and it remains the most unflinching ecclesiastical portrait ever painted. Francis Bacon would later base his screaming popes on it, finding in Velazquez's honesty a mirror for twentieth-century anguish.