Word: baconian
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...lexicon of Baconian imagery is famous. Its most familiar component is the screaming Pope, smearily rising from blackness like carnivorous ectoplasm, his throne indicated by a pair of gold finials, the whole enclosed in a sketchy cage -- homage to an original that Bacon firmly denies having ever seen, the Velasquez portrait of Innocent X in the Doria collection in Rome. There are the Crucifixion motifs, reflections of Grunewald and the Cimabue Crucifixion in Santa Croce that was partly destroyed by the 1966 Florence flood, whose sinuous and near boneless body Bacon once startlingly compared to "a worm crawling down...
...vision of human affairs and the neurasthenic, broken allusiveness of early Eliot -- a cinematic, quick-cutting mixture of "nostalgia for classical mythology, the abruptness of modern manners, the threat of the unseen and the eruption of casual violence." Some lines from Eliot's "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" are quite Baconian...
...proofs" of this attitude. The legends of Snow White, of Hansel and Gretel, of Goldilocks are parsed for every psychological nuance. Here the reader leaves the nursery for what Vladimir Nabokov calls "the fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works) and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents." To Bettelheim, Goldilocks' peek into the bears' house "evokes associations to the child's desire to find out the sexual secrets of adults...
Such interlunations, of course, remain-Adams' "shadows." But those aside, Jefferson possessed a resplendently Baconian intellect, a mind with all its windows open. The scope and subtlety of that mind is on full view in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, a superb collection of his letters and public writings. The reader can begin almost anywhere in the book and come away refreshed. Perhaps the best starting point is Jefferson's stately, passionate argument for independence: a declaration that issues from a ripe philosophical vision of the natural rights of man. His Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom begins with resonances...
...skin," he once remarked. And he does. Structure emerges from the tracks of the looping brush as though naturalism were being reinvented. The result is that Bacon's distortions have a unique kind of anatomical conviction. Collectively, they amount to nothing less than a group portrait in which Baconian man-lecherous, wary, perversely heroic-carries on his flesh the cumulative imprint of self-destruction...