black hues, the white tones dominating. Over half of the work is unpainted, essentially bare canvas. According to the theologian and curator Friedhelm Mennekes, the viewer's attention is thus solely focused "on the figure in agony on the cross, or more precisely: on the mouth, gaping and distorted in its cry". The body of the chimera, or hybrid bird, is rendered with light paint, and from it hang narrow red streams of paint, indicating the drips and spatter of blood. Bacon uses pentimenti to emphasise the hopelessness of the animal's death throes. The painting contains the same white angular rails as the mid-grounds of his 1949 Head II, Head VI, and Study for Portrait of the same year. In this panel, the rails are positioned just below the area where the horizontal and vertical bars of the cross intersect. The rail begins with a diagonal line which intersects the chimera at what appears to be the creature's shoulder. The horizontal angular geometrical shape is sketched in white and grey in the mid-ground, and represents an early form of a spatial device Bacon was to develop and perfect during the 1950s, when it effectively became a cage used to frame the anguished figures portrayed in Bacon's foregrounds. In the mid-ground, the artist has sketched a street scene, which features walking stick figures and cars. The pedestrians appear oblivious to the slaughter before them. Imagery and sources The bleakness of the painting is informed by the artist's harsh nihilism and existentialist view of life. Bacon was raised as a Christian, but according to his friend and biographer Michael Peppiatt, when he found he could no longer believe he was "extremely disappointed and furious, and anybody with a scrap of religious belief ... he would go for them". Peppiatt makes the observation of Bacon that "if somebody has that intensity, it's almost a faith in and of itself". The painting has been linked both thematically and in its formal construction to Bacon's 1956 work Owls, and to preparatory sketches only brought to the art market in the late 1990s. The art critic Armin Zweite traces the origin of the lower figure to a photograph of an owl that Bacon found in a book on birds in motion; Bacon has replaced the bird's beak with a wide open human mouth. Open mouth Screaming mouths appear in many of Bacon's works from the late 1940s