Fragment of a Crucifixion is an unfinished 1950 painting by the Irish-born figurative painter Francis Bacon. It shows two animals engaged in an existential struggle; the upper figure, which may be a dog or a cat, crouches over a chimera and is at the point of kill. It stoops on the horizontal beam of a T-shaped structure, which may signify Christ's cross. The painting contains thinly sketched passer-by figures, who appear as if oblivious to the central drama. Typical of Bacon's work, the painting is drawn from a wide variety of sources, including the screaming mouth of the nurse in Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film Battleship Potemkin and iconography from both the Crucifixion of Jesus and the descent from the cross. The chimera's despair forms the centrepiece of the work; its agony can be compared to Bacon's later works focusing on the motif of an open mouth. Although the title has religious connotations, Bacon's personal outlook was bleak; as an atheist, he did not believe in either divine intervention nor an afterlife. As such, the work seems to represent a nihilistic and hopeless view of the human condition. He later dismissed the painting, considering it too literal and explicit. He abandoned the theme of the crucifixion for the following 12 years, not returning to it until the more loosely based, but equally bleak, triptych Three Studies for a Crucifixion. The painting is housed in the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Description The upper creature may be a dog or a cat. Blood pours out of its mouth onto the head and body of its prey, a chimera rendered as owl-like with human facial characteristics. The prey unsuccessfully struggles to flee from its captor. The lower figure's human aspect is most notable in the details of its mouth and genitalia. Both figures are positioned in the centre foreground of the canvas, and are each mutilated and covered in blood, their physical discomfort contrasted against the flat, neutral background typical of Bacon's paintings. The figures exhibit many elements found in his early work, noticeably the expressive broad strokes set against the tightness of the flat, nondescript background. The link with the biblical Crucifixion is made through the raised arms of the lower creature, and the T-shaped cross. The canvas is almost entirely stripped of colour. The T-shaped cross is dark blue; the two figures are painted in a mixture of white and