It has a connection with ancient Egyptian art yet is much craggier, if more natural in its fleshy chest and arms. This massive character strides towards you in the main hall of the National Museum, its presence as mysterious as an Easter Island head. Bacon’s is a prophetic image that sees into the darkest corners of hell. Painted a decade before Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann sat in a glass box for his trial in Jerusalem. The enthroned figure is stuck in a limbo between palace and prison: there are traces of gothic vaulting that suggest the Sistine Chapel yet he is isolated inside a glass booth. In this 1951 masterpiece he reaches into the past to capture the anguish of the present. Yet Bacon, a gay man before the reforms of the 1960s, always saw the mainstream with an outsider’s irony. Avant-garde art had always rejected traditional themes. It took a gambler and drinker to turn modern art on its head. The bloody spoils seem like a trophy, and are more chilling for it.
The culture clash that underpinned Cranach’s art – German courtly splendour and strait-laced religious reformation – powers a magnetic imagining of Jewish heroine Judith displaying the head of Assyrian general Holofernes. Lucas Cranach the Elder – Judith With the Head of Holofernes Photograph: Peter Cavanagh/Alamy Scotlandġ. Judith With the Head of Holofernes by Lucas Cranach.
