Cy Twombly: Lepanto

Description: Lepanto, Cy Twombly's ravishing suite of 12 large canvases in acrylic, crayon, and graphite, may be the artist's most satisfactory work. First exhibited at the Venice Biennale in the summer of 2001, the series depicts the famous 16th century sea battle raged by the combined European forces under Venetian leadership against the Ottoman invasion. Twombly's glorious, luminously intense sequence of panels is meant to be absorbed as a single image, a panoramic portrayal of war on a heroic scale, with the viewer standing in the midst of a battle that ends in the destruction of the Turkish fleet.