Orestes, only just released from persecution by the Eumeni-des; Hamlet reassembling his wits after the encounter with the Ghost; Don Juan, no more of a superman than his cowardly valet, but straining every nerve to defy the hell to which the Commander has doomed him; Maldoror, half-angel half-ogre, recovering his breath after the prolonged blasphemy of Les Chants; a sort of Falstaff, now jovial now reflective, whose debaucheries have left him looking almost as youthful as when he was a page in the Duke of Norfolk's household; a lucky gambler, directly aware of every aspect of our contem-porary upheavals, and whose elegantly modern silhouette we seem to glimpse at that precise moment, wholly outside clock-time, when he stakes his all on a throw of the dice, a hand of cards or the roulette wheel...

Orestes, only just released from persecution by the Eumeni-des; Hamlet reassembling his wits after the encounter with the Ghost; Don Juan, no more of a superman than his cowardly valet, but straining every nerve to defy the hell to which the Commander has doomed him; Maldoror, half-angel half-ogre, recovering his breath after the prolonged blasphemy of Les Chants; a sort of Falstaff, now jovial now reflective, whose debaucheries have left him looking almost as youthful as when he was a page in the Duke of Norfolk's household; a lucky gambler, directly aware of every aspect of our contem-porary upheavals, and whose elegantly modern silhouette we seem to glimpse at that precise moment, wholly outside clock-time, when he stakes his all on a throw of the dice, a hand of cards or the roulette wheel...

Francis Bacon,full face and in profile

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