This article: Bacon did not seek to illustrate the narrative of the tale, however. He told the French art critic Michel Leiris, "I could not paint Agamemnon, Clytemnestra or Cassandra, as that would have been merely another kind of historical painting ... Therefore I tried to create an image of the effect it produced inside me." Aeschylus' phrase "the reek of human blood smiles out at me" in particular haunted Bacon, and his treatments of the mouth in the triptych and many subsequent paintings were attempts to visualise the sentiment. In 1985, he observed that Aeschylus' phrase brought up in him "the most exciting images, and I often read it ... the violence of it brings up the images in me, 'the reek of human blood smiles out at me', well what could be more amazing than that."Bacon was introduced to Aeschylus through T. S. Eliot's 1939 play The Family Reunion, in which the protagonist Harry is haunted by "the sleepless hunters / that will not let me sleep". In Eliot's play, the Furies serve as embodiments of the remorse and guilt felt by Harry, who harbours a dark family secret, shared only with his sister. Bacon was captivated by Aeschylus' play, and keen to learn more about Greek tragedy, although he said many times that he regretted being unable to read the original in Greek. In 1942, he read the Irish scholar William Bedell Stanford's Aeschylus in his Style, and found the theme of obsessive guilt in The Oresteia to be highly resonant. In 1984, Bacon told Sylvester that although his painting's subject matter did not have a direct relationship with the poet's work, for him Eliot's work "opened the valves of sensation".The mouth of the triptych's central figure was also inspired by the nurse's scream in film director Sergei Eisenstein's Odessa Steps massacre sequence in The Battleship Potemkin (1925). In 1984, the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg confronted Bacon with a reproduction of the centre panel during the filming of a South Bank Show documentary, and observed that in his earlier career the artist seemed preoccupied with... contains an answer for the question: What is the name of the person who found the theme of obsessive guilt in The Oresteia to be highly resonant?, what is it ?


Bacon