cross link the painting to Rubens' Descent. The mouth in Rubens' painting is loosely opened, but in Bacon's it is taut. The main figure's legs are folded out of view and the figure's left arm is passive in Rubens' painting, but in the Bacon's painting the chimera's legs and arms are in violent motion, seemingly wildly flailing up and down. Cage Horizontal frames often featured in Bacon's 1950s and 1960s paintings. The motif may have been borrowed from the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who Bacon greatly admired and often corresponded with. Giacometti had employed the device in The Nose (1947) and The Cage (1950). Bacon's use of frames has suggested imprisonment to many commentators. Writing on their use in Fragment, Zweite mentions that the diagonal lines transform the cross into a guillotine. Reputation The religious imagery belies Bacon's atheist and nihilistic outlook. The painting contains no hope for redemption. Friedhelm Mennekes writes that in the victim's scream, "there is not even a lament of being forsaken by God. A god does not emerge for the figure jerking in mortal anguish in the painting". Sharpe identifies the tiny oblivious stick-figure passersby as the element that mostly removes the work from "a straightforward recapitulation of ancient religious iconography and into postwar modernity". Bacon was self-critical, and often destroyed or disowned his own work, including pieces held in high regard by critics and buyers. He came to dislike Fragment of a Crucifixion, viewing it as too simplistic and explicit, in the words of Russell, "too near the conventions of narrative-painting". This was an issue with which Bacon struggled throughout his career: he aimed to create imagery that would be instantly recognisable, immediate and directly involving for the viewer, while also staying loyal to his creed of producing "non-illustrative painting". Bacon returned to the crucifixion theme in his 1962 Three Studies for a Crucifixion. That depiction is a more oblique and less literal utilisation of the iconography of the biblical scene, but a more direct invocation of imagery of the slaughterhouse and slabs of meat. References Notes Sources Adams, James Luther & Yates, Wilson & Warren, Robert. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Grand Rapids, MI: William B Eerdmans Publishing, 1997. Alley, Ronald & Alley, John. Francis Bacon. London: Thames & Hudson, 1964. Baldassari, Anne. Bacon and Picasso. Paris: Flammarion, 2005. Brintnall, Kent. Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-in-Pain as Redemptive Figure. Chicago, IL: The University of