Today I was checking something on Know Your Meme and saw "Knowledge is power. France is bacon" up in the trending section. Since syncs with the name Francis have been a thing recently, I clicked. Here's the "Origin" section:
On October 28th, 2010, Redditor OrdinaryPanda submitted a post to the /r/AskReddit subreddit, which asked what words or phrases other Redditors misunderstood as children. In the comments section of the post, Redditor Lord_Baron confessed to mishearing the quote "Knowledge is power – Francis Bacon" as Knowledge is power, France is bacon." Prior to being archived, the commented accumulated over 7,600 up votes.
Since one of my earlier Francis syncs had involved a pope and a famous painting (Pope Francis gluing himself to The Creation of Adam in "The 'Sixteen' Chapel"), this made me think of a different Francis Bacon, the painter best known for his Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. (I hate that painting. While it may show a bit more technical skill than Duchamp's mustached Mona Lisa, it's the same basic idea -- only Bacon's sacrilege is greater, since Diego Velázquez's original is far greater than the Mona Lisa.) On a whim, I looked him up on Wikipedia:
Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his raw, unsettling imagery. Focusing on the human form, his subjects included crucifixions, portraits of popes, self-portraits, and portraits of close friends, with abstracted figures sometimes isolated in geometrical structures. Rejecting various classifications of his work, Bacon said he strove to render "the brutality of fact." He built up a reputation as one of the giants of contemporary art with his unique style.
Heh, "one of the giants of contemporary art." Yes, that's the mot juste.
So, there's a bit of symmetry. On October 28, I happened upon an old receipt dated October 30, 1984. (See "Oops, did I mess up one of those anniversary syncs?") Today, October 30, I found this sync about October 28. (I wrote most of this post at around 10:30 p.m. on October 30. Then I was interrupted and didn't get around to finishing it until after midnight.)
Know Your Meme credits "France is bacon" to someone called Lord_Baron -- a double title that syncs with Count von Count and the Duke of Earl -- but it's actually a mistake. The reddit screenshot provided clearly shows the username as Lard_Baron, presumably meant as a pun on "oil baron."
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After writing all of the above but before publishing, I ran an image search for diego velazquez pope innocent x. My initial plan was just to find a high-resolution photo of it and look at it -- it's a great painting, one of my favorites -- but I got sidetracked.
One of the first results was from an article titled "Velázquez’s Pope eclipses Bacon's 'silly' screamers" -- a synchronistically interesting choice of words, so I clicked. The opening paragraph:
Recently, I was about to see a painting by a favourite artist that I had never viewed in the flesh—the Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650) by Diego Velázquez in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome. Yet amid my excitement was a hint of trepidation. Two things provoked it. First, the fear of disappointment. Just before my visit, the artist Mark Leckey had confided in our A brush with... podcast how he had journeyed to view Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling but found that he “couldn’t see it”. He said: “I made this pilgrimage. And then it was denied by the crowds and everything else. It was just horrible.”
One of the Francis syncs in "The 'Sixteen' Chapel" was Francis Berger going to see the Sistine Chapel. Frank had said that "From a purely museum visit perspective, it was a disaster."
Going back to the image search results, another of the first ones was a blog post pointing out that Innocent X in the portrait looks like Gene Hackman. I clicked that one, too. Since in this post I had just written that the Velázquez portrait was much better than the Mona Lisa, I was surprised to see the juxtaposition in this "Pope Gene Hackman X" post:
Gene Hackman was in the sync stream two years ago. In fact, I did a sync post titled simply "Gene Hackman."
1 comment:
"“I made this pilgrimage. And then it was denied by the crowds and everything else. It was just horrible.”
That sums it up well and mirrors my own experience. It's a shame.
I felt especially bad for my son, who had looked forward to seeing the chapel for months. After we emerged, I asked him what he thought, and he simply shrugged his shoulders and said, "I don't know. I didn't really see it."
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