Triptychs, Eternity and the Spirituality of

the Body

D. C. Ambrose Canterbury Christ Church University

Abstract
This paper develops a detailed reading of Deleuze’s philosophical study
of Bacon’s triptychs in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. It
examines his claims regarding their apparent non-narrative status, and
explores the capacity of the triptychs to embody and express a spiritual
sensation of the eternity of time.
Keywords: Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon, triptychs, eternity, spiritual
realism, rhythm
One of Deleuze’s ambitions in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation is
to outline an experimental conceptual analogue of Bacon’s paintings that
demonstrates a genuine fidelity to the specificity of his work. His book
produces a philosophy of painting where Bacon is conceived as one of
the great painters of immanence, a painter of the body without organs.
His figural paintings are understood to repeatedly explore the vital
intensities and sensations associated with the dynamisms of becoming,
processes of individuation and the destratification of the organism,
subject and individual. Deleuze suggests that a brutal form of realism
is manifested by Bacon’s art, but it is not a realism associated with
the violence of appearance but a violence of sensation associated with
a spiritual realism of the body. Bacon’s paintings depict, he claims,
a visceral topography of embodied sensation that is profoundly non-
representational and spiritual.
One of the most complex and creative sections of the book is his
philosophical analysis of the triptychs. In just a few dense pages he
arguably provides one of the most powerful accounts yet written about
triptychs in relation to the questions of what they are, how they function,
and what operative principles govern their production. In this paper
I wish to develop a reading of Deleuze’s philosophical understanding
of the triptychs that incorporates his arguments regarding their
260 D. C. Ambrose

non-narrative status within the claims he makes about their capacity

to express a spiritual sensation of the eternity of time.1 I will briefly
demonstrate that the notion of eternity being elicited from Bacon’s
triptychs is largely derived from Spinoza’s Ethics, namely, the eternity
of substance and the eternal cycles of becoming. However, in order to
fully grasp the significance of Deleuze’s claims regarding the eternal time
of triptychs it is necessary to re-examine his initial analysis of classic
religious painting which forms much of the context for his argument.
Despite the fact that religious art labours under the auspices of obvious
narrative content, Deleuze will claim that it is still capable of conveying
intense spiritual sensations associated with the celestial and abstract
realm. Once we develop an understanding of how this was achieved
in the past, the significance Bacon’s liberation from the constraints of
narrative has for his ability to embody a Spinozistic sense of eternity
within the mechanism of triptychs can be explored.
In an interview from 1981 Deleuze talked explicitly about the role
intuition played in developing his own understanding of the triptychs
when writing: ‘I was looking at the triptychs and had the feeling
that there was a certain internal law, forcing me to jump from one
reproduction to the other to compare them’ (Deleuze 2006: 184). Some
initial remarks on the triptychs are also contained in the preface to the
English translation of the book,2 where he clearly identifies the broad
shape of his subsequent, more detailed reading. From the very beginning
Deleuze aligns himself closely with Bacon’s own remarks on triptychs,
which were made in an interview from 1962 with David Sylvester
(Sylvester 1987). Deleuze recognises an inherent quality in Bacon’s
triptychs, which he terms their ‘internal law’. Triptychs are composed
of three distinct sections, with the separation between panels serving
to effectively negate any imposed narrative meaning across the different
parts. However, for Deleuze it is precisely this separation which provides
the means for linking the three panels in new and unique ways. He argues
that there has to be some kind of relationship between the separated
parts of each triptych, but that this relationship cannot be narrative or
logical in any straightforward way. As he identifies in his subsequent
analysis, there is a definite logic but it is of a profoundly irrational
order – it is a ‘logic of sensation’. The triptychs establish a common
unifying fact for the diverse and separated figures within each of the
three panels, but it is a unity radically removed from narrative meaning.
Figures present in triptychs become reconceived as ‘rhythmic characters’
rather than agents or subjects operating within a narrative. Triptychs
exhibit a ‘brutal’ unity where an array of complex forces and sensations,
 Triptychs, Eternity and the Spirituality of the Body 261

rather than stories, are distributed across the separated panels. Each
triptych operates like an infernal machine producing novel circulations
and rhythmic interplays of these characters, forces and sensations.
Somewhat enigmatically, Deleuze identifies a mysterious, unifying force,
which is captured by the arrangement of the triptychs but which is also,
simultaneously, the force operating to structure and unite the triptychs.
This force acts to separate figures, both within and across the panels, and
the panels themselves. Deleuze suggests that this unifying and separating
force is the force of eternal time.
Before progressing with an analysis of Deleuze’s complex reading
of the triptychs, I think it is necessary to question the legitimacy of
his emphasis on the non-narrative status of Bacon’s triptychs. One
might take the view that Bacon’s insistence, when in conversation with
Sylvester, on there being no explicit straightforward narrative is in
fact mendacious, that it is part of his effort to control and conceal
inconvenient biographical truths and sources in favour of constructing
an elaborate mythological artistic persona. Whilst this is probably
the case, it remains possible that his broader non-narrative ambitions
indicate a more significant philosophical and artistic ambition that is
indeed worth taking seriously. For Deleuze, Bacon’s work instantiates
a profoundly anti-narrative spiritual dynamic of matter. Nevertheless,
by focusing on the non-narrative element I do not believe that Deleuze
is altogether denying residues of narrative content that might be clearly
present and form an important factor in fully understanding a specific
composition. Bacon’s deeply personal obsessions, experiences and
inspirations form and shape the voluntaristic intentions that guide his
hand at a primary pre-pictorial level and at the ‘first level’ of figuration
on the canvas.3 Deleuze is not necessarily denying the existence of this
type of intentionality, rather he is bracketing it off, suspending explicit
consideration of it, in order to concentrate upon the ‘involuntaristic’
aspect of Bacon’s practice or the ‘second order’ of figuration. It is here,
within what he calls ‘the diagram’, that Bacon’s particular range of visual
motifs are injected into a metamorphic, transformative and liberating
realm (or experimental amphitheatre) of paint on the canvas.
A significant clue to understanding Deleuze’s attitude towards specific
narrative residue emerges from his treatment of religious painters whose
figurative innovations are linked to Bacon’s own. When discussing the
structural and historical underpinnings of Bacon’s practice, Deleuze
discusses one of Bacon’s operative propositions (a proposition derived
from André Malraux) that is almost a truism within modern art, and
would seemingly necessitate a move within painting towards a form
262 D. C. Ambrose

of total or absolute abstraction. This is the supposed conditioning of

painting by ‘religious possibilities’ or imperatives which simply no longer
apply, given that we arguably exist within an atheistic milieu. Deleuze
contests whether this historical proposition is really adequate. Such
contestation is only the first of a series of critical contestations of Bacon’s
ideas as outlined in the Sylvester interviews, many of which go some way
towards countering the idea that Deleuze is guilty of the most crude and
naïve intentional fallacy, and of slavishly adhering to Bacon’s point of
view. I want to argue that Deleuze’s remarks on religious painting are
critically incisive and do genuinely illuminate an important aspect of
Bacon’s work. More importantly, for my purposes, they provide useful
insight into Deleuze’s concentration on the non-narrative character
of Bacon’s triptychs. When writing of Bacon’s proposition regarding
the way painting’s representational function was largely confined by
religious or theological sentiment, Deleuze responds by arguing that
‘the link between the pictorial element and religious sentiment . . . seems
poorly defined by the hypothesis of a figurative function that was
simply sanctified by faith’ (Deleuze 2003: 9). To support his argument
Deleuze analyses El Greco’s The Burial of Count Orgaz. He notes the
presence of a horizontal division separating the painting into two distinct
sections – the terrestrial and the celestial. In the lower section of the
painting there is figurative and narrative content (albeit unorthodox and
already displaying a degree of figural distortion) as the Count’s terrestrial
dead body is laid to rest in the Earth. However, in the upper section
where the count’s living spirit is being received by Christ, there is an
astonishing figural liberation – ‘the Figures are lifted up and elongated,
refined without measure, outside all constraint’ (Deleuze 2003: 9). The
figures in this section of the canvas are relieved of their representative
(earthly and bodily) role, and are placed upon an entirely different,
spiritual register (they are being put ‘into relation with an order of
celestial sensations’ [Deleuze 2003: 9]). Deleuze uses this particular
work to demonstrate how a Christian painting, ostensibly governed
by the historical task of representing and communicating a sacred
narrative, discovered startlingly aberrant painterly means for expressing
non-representational and sensational affects. Here ‘lines, colours and
movements’ are freed from the demands of representation and narration,
and express celestial, infernal, immaterial and spiritual sensations. This
is particularly true if one spends any time at all looking at the different
ways Christ’s body is depicted within the history of Christian painting
as a means of expressing the broadest range of intense and extreme
sensations, ranging from Cimabue to Grünewald.4
 Triptychs, Eternity and the Spirituality of the Body 263

Deleuze’s argument suggests that great religious narrative paintings,

marked by representational imperatives, provide the conditions of
possibility for an essential liberation of figures, i.e. the emergence of
Figures5 freed from figurative constraints and able to become the vehicles
of sensation. He notes that ‘Christianity contains a germ of tranquil
atheism that will nurture painting; the painter can easily be indifferent
to the religious subject he is asked to represent’ (Deleuze 2003: 124). In
Christian painting representational and narrative space is placed into
a direct relation with not only accidents but also an aberrant non-
representational space (an any-space-whatsoever), a spiritual space, the
realm of the immaterial and the invisible. Intriguingly, Deleuze returns
to the theme of Christian painting at the end of the book with a
discussion of ‘pictorial fact’ (as opposed to representation, thematisation
and narration) in Michelangelo’s work. With Michelangelo ‘pictorial
fact’ emerges in its purest state from Christian art where ‘the forms
may still be figurative, and there may still be narrative relations between
the characters’ – but these constitute the residues of the primary act of
figural painting which are supplanted by the properly ‘pictorial fact’
(Deleuze 2003: 160). With Michelangelo Christian painting achieves
an extraordinary level of pictorial facticity which ‘no longer tells a
story and no longer represents anything but its own movement, and
which makes these apparently arbitrary elements coagulate in a single
continuous flow’ (Deleuze 2003: 160). His figures realise, within the
realm of Christian art, a form of proto-Baconian pictorial fact where
organic figuration provides a painterly vehicle for the ‘revelation of the
body beneath the organism’ (i.e. the body without organs).6 This body
beneath the organic figure causes it to ‘crack or swell’ and imposes a
‘spasm’ on it forcing it into a relation with ‘forces’ – ’sometimes with
an inner force that arouses them, sometimes with external forces that
traverse them, sometimes with the eternal force of an unchanging time,
sometimes with the variable forces of a flowing time’ (Deleuze 2003:
160–1).7
If the extraordinary manifestation of bizarre figural metamorphoses
in classical religious art (Cimabue, El Greco, Tintoretto) are functions of
a religious sentiment being explicitly narrated, figured and represented
in the paintings of this time, then one cannot legitimately abstract the
religious sentiment from them, despite recognising within modernity
that such ‘truths’ no longer hold. Religious sentiment and narration (for
example, Christ’s passion, the Creation, the Apocalyptic visions of Hell)
animate and inform not only the efforts within painting to ‘represent’
them as events in space and time, but also the efforts to express them
264 D. C. Ambrose

as intensities, sensations, and extreme modes of affectivity (a divine

realm seen and a divine realm felt). The affective register of religious
painting remains locked into a causal relationship with the narrative
content of the Christian religion. Such art might aim to represent a
particular event in Christ’s life (e.g. the crucifixion) as a type of religious
or spiritual portrait, however to do this it is not enough merely to
illustrate it as a discrete event in time. Rather, it is important to utilise
the depiction of such events to communicate the affective force of the
‘spiritual’ depth associated with them. This affective quality, informed
by religious sentiment, operates as a disruptive modulator to ‘good’
stable representational form and the earthly body becomes subject to
deformation by invisible celestial forces. Bacon’s own practice inherits
much of this dynamic structure in so far as his work displays repeated
motifs seemingly borrowed from (or almost certainly analogous to)
traditional religious art – i.e. crucifixions, death and physical dissolution,
bodies in the process of becoming immaterial (a process of ‘becoming-
indiscernible’), bodies confronting spirits, and bodies placed in relation
to animals (a process of ‘becoming-animal’). However, the religious
sentiment and concrete theological concerns have been extracted and
are no longer being represented or narrated. For Deleuze, Bacon’s
paintings operate like great religious paintings evacuated of their
religious narrative and representation. Such content is simply of no
relevance to Bacon – his work signifies an accelerated form of pictorial
atheism, the very roots of which Deleuze identifies as being present in
great Christian art itself. This explains the insistence upon the non-
narrative quality of Bacon’s triptychs – first and foremost Figures become
the vehicles of sensation (rhythmic characters) and survive to serve as
representative characters in a depicted narrative only in a residual and
secondary manner, as in Michelangelo’s work.
Deleuze’s account is not incompatible with the idea that certain
residues of narration remain as inevitable, irreducible or deliberate
traces. Indeed, his account allows for the insistence that the primary
narrative content (in so far as any can be adequately and accurately
established) forms an important framework in the overall germination,
negotiation and sculpting of forms in space and time on the canvas.
What Deleuze does insist upon, and in this he is absolutely aligned
with Bacon’s own statements, is the subsidiary status of such content.
Bacon’s paintings involve an evacuation of religious content, theological
narrative and spiritual drama, and the effort to replace it with an
elaborate and audacious attempt to translate elements and events
drawn from his own physical existence and filter them through his
 Triptychs, Eternity and the Spirituality of the Body 265

particular nervous system onto the canvases as figured sensation. The

historical specificity of Bacon’s life becomes reconfigured through art
into the grandeur of elemental eternity. This clearly fits with Deleuze’s
recognition of how the ‘eternity of art’ remains a constant reference for
Bacon’s practice: ‘Like Rodin, he [Bacon] thinks that durability, essence,
or eternity are the primary characteristics of the work of art’ (Deleuze
2003: 123)
In my reading of Deleuze an understanding of Bacon emerges as
a ‘spiritual’ painter (a mystical atheist). He enacts a similar dialogue
between the ‘actual’ and the ‘virtual’ as El Greco had explored
between the material and the spiritual, or the terrestrial and the
celestial. Following the pictorial facticity of Michelangelo, Bacon’s
paintings pursue a hyperbolic form of pictorial hysteria where he
is directly attempting, again and again, to release the presences
beneath representation, beyond representation. His paintings repeatedly
attempt to make such overwhelming and intense presence immediately
visible. When discussing Bacon’s renunciation of represented violent
spectacles in favour of excavating the invisible forces beneath or beyond
appearance as sensation, Deleuze comes close to identifying Bacon’s
‘spiritual’ thematic, his spiritual conviction, as ‘a kind of declaration
of faith in life’ (Deleuze 2003: 61). He considers statements from
the interviews with Sylvester (particularly the remarks about cerebral
pessimism and nervous optimism), and asks why choosing to paint ‘the
scream more than the horror’, the violence of sensation, more than the
violence of the spectacle, is an act of vital faith. In his clearest and
most unambiguous passage Deleuze writes of Bacon’s indomitable and
visceral spirituality which has supplanted hoary old religious truisms and
transcendental myths:

But why is it an act of vital faith to choose ‘the scream more than the
horror’, the violence of sensation more than the violence of the spectacle?
The invisible forces, the powers of the future – are they not already upon
us, and much more insurmountable than the worst spectacle and even the
worst pain? Yes, in a certain sense – every piece of meat testifies to this. But
in another sense, no. When, like a wrestler, the visible body confronts the
powers of the invisible, it gives them no other visibility than its own. It is
within this visibility that the body actively struggles, affirming the possibility
of triumphing, which was beyond its reach as long as these powers remained
invisible, hidden in a spectacle that sapped our strength and diverted us. It is
as if combat had now become possible. The struggle with the shadow is the
only real struggle. When the visual sensation confronts the invisible force that
conditions it, it releases a force that is capable of vanquishing the invisible
266 D. C. Ambrose

force, or even befriending it. Life screams at death, but death is no longer
this all-too-visible thing that makes us faint; it is this invisible force that life
detects, flushes out, and makes visible through the scream. Death is judged
from the point of view, and not the reverse, as we like to believe. Bacon, no
less than Beckett, is one of those artists who, in the name of a very intense
life, can call for an even more intense life. He is not a painter who ‘believes’
in death. His is indeed a figurative misérabilisme, but one that serves an
increasingly powerful Figure of life. . . In the very act of ‘representing’ horror,
mutilation, prosthesis, fall, or failure, they have erected indomitable Figures,
indomitable through both their insistence and their presence. They have given
life a new and extremely direct power of laughter. (Deleuze 2003: 61–2)

This ethos is clearly linked to Bacon’s efforts, following Michelangelo,

to render life and time visible through the material of the body. For
Bacon there is the chronomatic force of changing time which he depicts
through the allotropic variation of bodies, and which involves a degree
of figural deformation; and then there is the force of eternal time, the
eternity of time, which is established through the uniting–separating
that reigns in the triptychs, a pure light. One can begin to discern
the reason for Deleuze’s insistence upon the complete evacuation of
represented narrative from Bacon’s work (as he insists is evident within
Michelangelo’s work too), or at least its relegation to secondary traces
or residues. What Bacon’s work ultimately tries to figure is an expression
of something fundamentally inexpressible, what it brings to visibility is
something which is usually invisible, what it attempts to figure is the
un-figurable. His work cannot be simply reduced to a matter of what
is straightforwardly representational or narrative, since these imply the
prior existence of things, events and ideas to be merely represented as
such. It presupposes that all the things in Bacon’s paintings exist prior
to the work as something to be represented or narrated. For Deleuze,
Bacon’s ultimate theme lies outside all such coordinates, in much the
same way as the divine celestial realm had for the classic Christian
painters. There, a sensation (an affective element) of these realms could
be allied to the familiar representational coordinates of the religious or
theological dogmas of the time. With Bacon no such scripture exists
apart from his own lived reality in time, his own nervous system, which
he transmutes into figures resonating and hystericised by the invisible
forces and intensities of the virtual in matter and the eternity of time.
Having established the ‘spiritual’ dynamics and thematics of Bacon’s
work, this paper will now proceed with an analysis of how that
work specifically functions to encapsulate a certain sensation of time,
namely of eternity. Deleuze initially establishes the key elements in their
 Triptychs, Eternity and the Spirituality of the Body 267

structural mechanics. Underpinning their mechanics is the principle of

rhythm. In the triptychs, he argues, rhythms become characters and
objects. By initially focusing on their rhythmic characteristics, Deleuze
identifies three basic rhythms being circulated across the separated
panels of many triptychs.
1. A steady or attendant rhythm
2. Crescendo or simplification
3. A diminuendo or elimination
Referring to Bacon’s triptychs, Deleuze attempts to uncover each of
their rhythmic elements and demonstrate the full complexity of their
actual interplay across the panels. The attendant rhythmic character
does not necessarily always signify a straightforward visible observer
or spectator/voyeur despite their frequent appearance in triptychs (for
example, the presence of a voyeuristic figure in the right panel of
Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Poem ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, 1967;
a sinister cameraman in the right panel of Triptych – Studies from the
Human Body, 1970, and the spectators in both the left and right panel
of the Crucifixion Triptych, 1965). Rather the attendant refers to a
constant function, a steady measure or cadence in relation to which
spectators are able to discern or distinguish rhythmic variation. This
function can have multiple objects which might include, but not be
restricted to, the circular arena, photographic apparatus, photographs
of figures, faces or objects which are flattened out onto two dimensional
mirror-like surfaces, or it can be presented in several figures. Deleuze
claims that it can be figured through flat hysterical smiles, the prone
bodies of sleepers, and/or coupled or copulating bodies. These are
defined as attendants because of their steady and almost constant
horizontality. This horizontal quality defines a rhythm without increase
or decrease, augmentation of diminution. However, the attendant
function is anything but simple, and Deleuze goes some considerable
way to further developing an account of its apparent complexity. Whilst
the attendant function can initially be seen as something deliberately
imposed upon certain visible characters in the paintings, it actually
abandons them to become an autonomous rhythmic character which
emerges into existence at different points throughout the three panels
of a triptych. It does this by being assigned as that character by
the active rhythmic characters in other parts of the painting. This
dynamic, autonomous and self-generating character of the work is
clearly something that resonates deeply with Bacon’s own understanding
of the process of auto-composition and auto-figuration. In an interview
268 D. C. Ambrose

with Sylvester from 1979, Bacon said: ‘I don’t really think my pictures
out, you know; I think of the disposition of the forms and then I watch
the forms form themselves’ (Sylvester 1987: 136). This auto-formation
of forms explains the type of emergence of the attendant rhythmic
character in triptychs that Deleuze indicates. Attendant function might
subsequently emerge from figures in full context which, if isolated
from the entire composition, might actually appear to have either
active or passive rhythms. For Deleuze this is why some of the prone
sleeping characters in the triptychs have an odd trace of activity or
passivity – so although explicitly situated across the horizontal they
retain a certain heaviness or vivacity, relaxation or contraction, that
comes from elsewhere. Equally, attendants can be seen as assuming other
functions – as on the brink of turning to an active rhythm or passive
rhythm – thus linking themselves to one or the other and ceasing to be
an attendant.8 This fluid autonomy creates not only great tension and
instability but is also indicative of an extraordinary mobility within
triptychs, what Deleuze terms their ‘great circulation’. It is as if the
triptychs function like musical machines possessing a range of different
rhythmic permutations.
Having introduced the attendant rhythmic character, Deleuze
proceeds with an explanation of the two vertical directions of active and
passive rhythms. The simplest variation consists of descending or rising
opposition (for example, Triptych – Three Studies for a Crucifixion,
1962) or perhaps a diastolic/systolic opposition. Occasionally the
opposition at play is between being naked or clothed, or an
augmentation/diminution of the flesh. Throughout different triptychs
there exists an extraordinarily subtle and diverse process of additions
and subtractions. The example which Deleuze talks about in most
detail is Bacon’s Triptych – August, 1972 depicting George Dyer, which
he claims is Bacon’s most ‘profoundly musical painting’. Across this
triptych Bacon uses figural mutilation and prostheses in ‘a game of
added and subtracted values’ (Deleuze 2003: 79). The triptych is like an
assemblage of hysterical sleepings and wakings affecting diverse parts of
the body. Here, the attendant couple in the centre panel are accompanied
by organic elongations and a clear and well defined mauve oval. On
the left panel the figure has a diminished torso, having had a significant
portion of its body subtracted; while on the right the figure is in the
process of being built up or added to. However, everything changes
if one looks at the legs. In the left panel one leg is completed while
the other is being subject to further addition and definition, while in
the right panel, it is just the opposite – one leg has been amputated
 Triptychs, Eternity and the Spirituality of the Body 269

and the other is apparently flowing away. Correlatively the defined

mauve oval in the centre panel changes its status within the other two
panels – on the left panel it is transformed into a pink liquid pool lying
next to the chair, and then becomes a red liquid discharge flowing out
from the figure’s leg in the right panel.
For Deleuze this profoundly musical triptych is emblematic of the
degree of rhythmic complexity and variation achieved by triptychs. The
diverse oppositions across different panels are never logically equivalent
in any normal sense and their different terms never quite coincide. What
triptychs represent is a radical combinatorial freedom where multiple
permutations can be produced. Each and every element can coexist in a
unified way – share a simple matter-of-fact – yet the different oppositions
set up can vary in diverse ways or even be reversed depending on the
perspective or viewpoint that one adopts as a viewer. One cannot assign
a single univocal role to the centre panel, since the constancy they
seemingly imply can change depending on the case at hand. Hence,
the horizontal of the constants govern extremely variable terms from
the viewpoint of both their nature and their relation. The dynamic
circulation is always composed of variable, opposable rhythms (where
each operates as the retro-gradation of the other) offset against a
common and constant value in the attendant rhythm.
At this point, in developing his understanding of the active rhythm,
Deleuze insists upon the primacy of ‘the fall’ in Bacon’s triptychs.
However, it is not a sense of descent which should be identified with
any straightforward spatial notion. The active is a fall in the sense of it
being a descending passage of sensation, a passage identifying variation
and difference of level within sensation. He claims that differences of
intensity in sensation are often experienced and figured in Bacon’s work
as a fall. Flesh descends from bones, the body descends from arms and
thighs. Sensation develops though this fall by falling from one level
to another. The fall thus exists to affirm a variation in level. Whilst
Deleuze reiterates Bacon’s view that one shouldn’t confuse the violence
of sensation with the violent spectacle, he also indicates that the so-
called fall of a sensation should not be confused with a fall through
spatial extension. Rather the fall records variation and change and is
simply what is most vital and alive in sensation. The fall is that which is
experienced as the sensation of living. This does not of course preclude
the possibility that it could coincide with a spatial descent. But equally
it could coincide with a rise. It could also be expressed through a variety
of different movements in the paintings – diastolic or systolic, dilation
or dissipation, diminution or augmentation. In this sense, the fall as
270 D. C. Ambrose

the measure of variation in sensation is precisely what is meant by the

active rhythm in the triptychs. Again, this active rhythm is fluid and
variable, and the degree to which it is assigned to a particular figure or
object within the painting rests upon which viewpoint or perspective one
chooses to adopt. It thus exchanges its function with the passive rhythm.
Having analysed the different rhythmic characters associated with
the triptychs, Deleuze establishes what he describes as ‘the laws of the
triptychs’.

1. There are three distinguishable, rhythmic figures.

2. There is the existence of an attendant rhythm which circulates
fluidly through the panels as both visible attendant and rhythmic
attendant.
3. There is a determination of an active and passive rhythm with all
of the variations that depend on the character chosen to represent
the active rhythm by the spectator.

Having set out these formal laws, Deleuze concludes by claiming that
they broadly embody a profoundly irrational logic, a logic of sensation,
that constitutes the art of painting in general. By stressing the power
and vitality of this non-normative logic and non-voluntaristic means
of composition, Deleuze instinctively aligns his own account again and
again with Bacon. In 1979 Bacon told Sylvester:
One of the things I’ve always tried to analyse is why it is that, if the formation
of the image that you want is done irrationally, it seems to come on to the
nervous system much more strongly than if you knew how you could do it.
Why is it possible to make the reality of an appearance more violently in
this way than by doing it rationally? Perhaps it’s that, if the making is more
instinctive, the image is more immediate. (Sylvester 1987: 121)

The full complexity of the formal elements now established, Deleuze

crucially shifts his attention to the question of what forces correspond
to the triptychs. What precisely is this complex machinic apparatus a
means of capture for? And in what way does this force impact upon the
structure of the triptychs? In the triptychs the question of the relation
between the different Figures becomes extremely significant. Figures are
violently projected onto the field and are often governed by the simplicity
and clarity of uniform colour or naked light. In many cases, the figures
look like trapeze artists whose milieu is nothing but light or colour. The
particular methodology identified by Deleuze within triptychs is again
something Bacon talks about with Sylvester. Particularly in relation to
the question of precision and clarity: ‘I’ve increasingly wanted to make
 Triptychs, Eternity and the Spirituality of the Body 271

the images simpler and more complicated. And for this to work it can
work more starkly if the background is very united and clear. I think
that probably is why I have used a very clear background against which
the image can articulate itself’ (Sylvester 1987: 121).
Deleuze observes that if this unity and clarity of light or colour
immediately incorporates and unifies the relationship between Figures
and the Field, the result is that Figures also attain their maximum
separation in light and colour. A force of separation or division
sweeps over them, placing them within an almost spiritual milieu of
eternity. This separation is therefore the unique principle of the triptychs
(their pictorial fact) – maximum unity of light and colour for the
maximum division of Figures. It is the force of this separating light and
colour that engenders the distinct yet interrelated, rhythmic characters.
The separation of bodies in universal light and colour becomes the
common fact of the Figures – their overall rhythmic being – a disjunctive
synthesis – a union that separates. A joining-together acts to separate the
Figures and colours. Such, Deleuze claims, is the quality of light. Figures
separate while falling into black light; colour fields separate while
falling into white light. In the triptychs everything becomes aerial – the
separation itself is in the air. Here time is no longer simply expressed in
the apparent chromatism of bodies via the broken tones across flesh – it
has become a monochromatic eternity. In the triptychs an immense
space-time unites all things as if in a fourth temporal dimension. Deleuze
writes of how triptychs, evacuated of any straightforward narrative
linkage, unite things only by introducing between them

the distances of a Sahara, the centuries of an aeon. Within the triptychs

there resides the mysterious force of the eternity of time. The three canvases
remain separated, figures within them remain separated, yet they are no
longer isolated. They are united within the eternity of time. The frames or
borders of each panel and the outlines of each figure no longer refer to the
limited unity of each but represent and figure the distributive unity of all.
(Deleuze 2003: 85)

In Bacon’s triptychs a profound sensation of eternal time is being

figured, producing brilliant aberrant figural spaces which resonate
historically with the greatest achievements in religious art to figure
the divine celestial realm. Bacon’s rhythmic characters flow with an
extraordinary dynamism across the vast spaces of the monochromatic
eternity presented within the triptychs, each expressing a new
spiritualism of matter, a new spiritualism of the body, as they perform
their small embodied feats upon the grand amphitheatre of nowhere,
272 D. C. Ambrose

all playing their different roles in the musicality of becoming. Deleuze’s

most complex and controversial claim about Francis Bacon in The Logic
of Sensation is thus to reconfigure him as a Spinozistic mystic, engaged
in the profoundest of spiritual revaluations of existence through art.
In the Ethics Spinoza defines eternity as that which stands outside
all duration or time – ‘Eternity can neither be defined by time nor
have any relation to time’ (Spinoza 1992: 214). True eternity stands
outside of all temporal categories whatsoever. ‘Before’, ‘after’, ‘now’,
‘later’ and all such ascriptions are completely inapplicable to what is
eternal. According to Spinoza God and Substance are both eternal,
and even individuated and singular things as instances of substance are
eternal. Despite the fact that we have no recollection of our own bodily
emergence from eternity ‘we feel and experience that we are eternal’
(Spinoza 1992: 214). For individuated bodies to be seen as eternal
they must be considered not in their temporally and spatially bound
state, where they are in relation to other finite things in their normal
durational existence, but from a more abstract perspective as atemporal
essences – what Spinoza terms sub specie aeternitatis. Thus, according to
Deleuze’s reading of Bacon’s triptychs, what Bacon ultimately manages
to elaborate is a profound spiritual mechanics for displaying Figures
under the aspect of eternity.

Notes
1. It is the ‘revelation’ of the ‘spirit’ immanent to the body which Deleuze suggests
as the entire ‘spiritual’ thematic of Bacon’s work. This point is clarified in
the chapter on ‘Hysteria’ where Deleuze links the spiritualism of Wilhelm
Worringer’s Gothic Line to Artaud’s Body-Without-Organs: ‘It [the Gothic Line]
attests to a high spirituality, since what leads it to seek the elementary forces
beyond the organic is a spiritual will. But this spirituality is a spirituality of the
body; the spirit is the body itself, the body without organs’ (Deleuze 2003: 46–7).
2. This text first appeared in Artforum in January 1984, and is republished (with
minor emendations) as a preface to the English translation of The Logic of
Sensation.
3. See Deleuze’s remarks in The Logic of Sensation (Deleuze 2003: 97–8) regarding
first and second order figuration in Bacon’s work.
4. This would seem to call for a rigorous study of Hegel’s remarks on the history and
development of Christian painting in the second volume of his Aesthetics. When
writing of how certain painters had depicted Christ’s suffering on the cross, he
notes how ‘some masters discovered an entirely peculiar tone of colour which
is not found in the human face. They had to disclose the night of the spirit,
and for this purpose fashioned a type of colour which corresponds in the most
splendid way to this storm, to these black clouds of the spirit that at the same
time are firmly controlled and kept in place by the brazen brow of the divine
nature’ (Hegel 1975: 824). Hegel writes at length about how painters had to
betray the verisimilitude of representation in order to express ‘spiritual’ depths
 Triptychs, Eternity and the Spirituality of the Body 273

and sensations. Deleuze’s own remarks on what he calls the ‘accident’ and the
depiction of Christ’s body in the history of Christian painting recall Hegel’s
remarks. Deleuze notes how ‘Christ is besieged, and even replaced by accidents’
(Deleuze 2003: 124).
5. This differentiation is marked in Deleuze’s text with the capitalised form of
‘Figure’.
6. Note Deleuze’s use of the specifically religious notion of ‘revelation’.
7. In a footnote to this passage Deleuze cites Luciano Bellosi’s work on
Michelangelo, which ‘has shown how Michelangelo destroyed the narrative
religious fact in favour of a properly pictorial or sculptural fact’ (Deleuze 2003:
196).
8. Of particular note here are the two spectral figures in the left panel of
Triptych – Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962. These two figures hover and
resonate with an ambiguous rhythmic character that is extremely disturbing and
affective.

References
Deleuze, Gilles (2003) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W.
Smith, London: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles (2006) Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995,
ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, New York:
Semiotexte.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1975) Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume II, trans. Malcolm
Knox, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Spinoza, Baruch (1992) Ethics, trans. Samuel Shirley, Indianapolis/Cambridge:
Hackett Publishing Company.
Sylvester, David (1987) The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, third
revised edition, London: Thames and Hudson.

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224109000634