Innocent X (2023) Original Oil Painting by Nicolas Maureau

Red shorts and a plain wooden chair where papal robes and a throne should be: Innocent X, the fourth work in the En Majesté series, takes its title from Velázquez's 1650 portrait of the pope, itself part of a longer tradition of red-haloed papal portraits going back to Raphael.

Francis Bacon later turned that same image into one of art history's most haunting icons, screaming and half dissolved. I saw the Velázquez original in Rome once, and it stopped me completely, one of those rare moments where a four-hundred-year-old painting still has the force of something happening right in front of you.

This painting carries that shock forward into a bare, almost naked body, stripped of every papal attribute, asking what remains of sacred authority once the robes and the throne are gone, and whether the aura was ever really in the symbols at all.

Materials used:

oil painting

Details:

• Oil painting on Canvas
• One of a kind artwork
• Size: 97 x 130 x 2cm / 97 x 130cm (actual image size)
• Ready to hang
• Signed on the back
• Style: Photorealistic
• Subject: People and portraits