Francis Bacon never hid his fascination with the art of the past. His love of the work of the old masters was personal, but he also believed that the study of their art should be a prerequisite for all contemporary painters. Most artists have acknowledged an interest in the art of previous eras in one way or another. Few, though, have embraced it as unashamedly as Bacon: at times for him it became an inextinguishable obsession.

The selection of paintings and sculptures in the forthcoming exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, many of which have never before been shown in the UK, is taken almost exclusively from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg and dates from ancient times to the 20th century. It includes a number of works that directly influenced Bacon, while others evoke the types of artwork he studied. The focus is less on the juxtaposition of works, and more on Bacon’s mysterious cycle of creation: his observation, interpretation and integration of the art of the past.

Bacon left many clues as to his uses of the art of the past, not just in interviews (notably those with David Sylvester) but also through the material found in his London studio, now in the Hugh Lane gallery in Dublin. The piles of books, hundreds of torn pages, stained photographs and press cuttings lying on the floor testify to a cultured and inquisitive mind at work. And here among the debris of the studio lie keys to unlocking Bacon’s highly individual art.

His biographers all refer to the significant impact on his early artistic development of pieces by other artists, whether in museums, exhibitions or books. During his three-month sojourn in France as a young man, he visited the fine collection of the duke of Aumale in Chantilly, as well as the Louvre and the Picasso exhibition at the Paul Rosenberg gallery. A few individual paintings made a lasting impression, and these occasionally reappear as references in his later work, for instance the echoes of Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents from Chantilly.

The earliest painting by Bacon in the exhibition, the Crucifixion of 1933, while typifying the artist’s fascination with the theme of Christ’s Passion, is evidence of his more general interest in morbid subjects. Although baptised and – at least in theory – educated as an Anglican, he always described himself as an agnostic. As he explained to Sylvester, he saw the Crucifixion not so much as a conventional religious subject, but as a theme that allowed for the expression of extreme human emotions: “Well, there have been so very many great pictures in European art of the Crucifixion that it’s a magnificent armature on which you can hang all types of feelings and sensations. You may think it’s a curious thing for a non-religious person to take the Crucifixion, but I don’t think that has anything to do with it. The great Crucifixions that one knows of – one doesn’t know whether they were painted by men who had religious beliefs.”

Bacon’s first Crucifixion uses a rather sombre and restrained palette, mostly black and grey. It translates the mute nature of sorrow in a manner that brings to mind Alonso Cano’s painting on the same theme, in which the body of Christ appears in isolation, lost in the vastness of a dark and empty universe. By contrast, Bacon employed a very bright, almost blinding orange in the background of his 1944 triptych Three Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion, focusing the mind of the viewer on the suffering and ambiguous nature of characters that are both human and bestial. Bacon often associated the Crucifixion with images of slaughterhouses and meat, referring to the “smell of death”. The triptych format that he used throughout his career is also, of course, a familiar religious idea borrowed from the art of the past: an allegory of the mystery of the Trinity.

Francis Bacon in 1975. Photograph: ITV/Rex Features

Cano’s Crucifixion, displayed opposite Bacon’s earliest treatment of the subject, exemplifies the severe and austere manner characteristic of the Sevillan school of painting of the first half of the 17th century. Cano (1601-67) was an exact contemporary of Velázquez (1599-1660) and shared the same painting teacher, Francisco Pacheco (although Cano was multi-faceted and also trained as an architect with his father, Miguel Cano, and as a sculptor with the famed baroque realist Juan Martínez Montañes). The similarity of their painting styles and their common frame of reference probably explain why, for a long time, the Hermitage Crucifixion was attributed to Velázquez.

Cano’s large painting was probably created as an altarpiece for the church of Santa Maria de la Oliva in Lebrija, where it was later replaced by a wooden sculpture of the same subject, also by Cano. By contrast, Bacon’s Crucifixion is small in scale, adopting the format of a cabinet picture. Both canvases are sculptural in effect, but in Cano’s painting the body of Christ is solid and well-developed in structure; whereas Bacon’s Christ is open in form, like an armature in metal. Cano’s Christ is sharply lit and the folds of Jesus’s white loincloth emerge in strong relief through highly skilled employment of chiaroscuro. The dark background is relieved only by the apocalyptic purplish glow above the low horizon. In Bacon’s painting, on the other hand, the subtly graded whites and greys impart a ghostly and phantasmagoric effect to the scene.

Bacon’s Crucifixion is probably the earliest of his paintings to have survived his destructive auto-censorship; it is a demonstration of the youthful painter’s remarkable and intuitive ability to create a three-dimensional image of great impact and symbolic resonance.

Titian’s Christ Carrying the Cross, a masterpiece of his late years which is hung nearby in the show, is equally dramatic. It concentrates on the human tragedy of the Passion but achieves this less through a play of light and shade than through the contrast of colours and textures, with thinly painted areas set against vivacious impasto. The face of Titian’s Christ exudes pain and sorrow; tears are welling in his eyes and drops of blood from the thorn-pricks run down his forehead and temple, coaxing the viewer into immediate engagement with Jesus’s agony, which is as much psychological as physical. Visually and symbolically, the painting seems to be made of flesh and blood. Titian’s ability to lay bare a world of deep and raw emotion and suffering was a profound influence on Bacon and, despite his atheism, Christian symbolism is ever present in his oeuvre. Bacon would employ such images in a kind of desperation as allegories of mankind’s tragic and ineluctable fate, or would turn them into new artistic icons whose sublime nature paradoxically suggested an underlying belief in the eternal and divine nature of creation.

Bacon’s distortion of his subject was an essential element of his art. “I’m always hoping to deform people into appearance; I can’t paint them literally,” he said. Van Gogh, one of his favourite painters, provided him with a precedent. The Dutch artist “was able to be almost literal and the way he put on the paint gives you a marvellous vision of the reality of things”. Rembrandt, too, offered Bacon a model of a reality altered through miraculous technique, where textured flesh and contrasts of light and shade are created by a rich, sombre palette and extravagant impasto. Bacon’s paint has a dense Rembrandt-esque quality: “I work between thick and thin paint. Parts of it are very thin and parts of it are very thick. And it just becomes clogged, and then you start to put on illustrational paint.” What Bacon also observed and emulated in Rembrandt was the serialisation of images: portraits, and in particular self-portraits, representing the same sitters or the artist himself over time. “Oddly enough, if you take the great late self-portraits of Rembrandt, you will find that the whole contour of the face changes time after time; it’s a totally different face, although it has what is called a look of Rembrandt, and by this difference it involves you in different areas of feeling.”

With a characteristic touch of cynicism, Bacon described contemporary art as “entirely a game by which man distracts himself”. And while there is undoubtedly an element of game-playing in Bacon’s approach to the old masters, there is also, whether consciously or not, an element of respect for their belief that their art served a higher purpose – one that defied the limits not just of their individuality, but also of their own mortality.

• Francis Bacon and the Masters is at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, from 18 April to 26 July.