I have been waiting since February, when greg.org hero Jack sent along the link to the Master Drawings Symposium, for video of this year’s Ricciardi Prize lecture by Giovanni Lusi. I finally watched it, and it’s great.
Of course, anyone who reconstructs the period library of Cy Twombly by analyzing the spines on a bookshelf in the 1966 Vogue Horst photoshoot is going to have my attention. Lusi’s work goes beyond the circumstantial to trace Twombly’s early, formative engagement in Rome with the works of Old Masters—in this case, Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and codices.
Lusi locates specific references and connections between Twombly drawings and paintings, including unearthing gallery checklists that show works with original titles like, “About Leonardo.” But the most fascinating thing for me was the link between Twombly’s all-over text and diagram painting compositions and the packed, palimpsest content of a Leonardo codex. It’s a reference I imagine almost no one at the time would have suggested for a young contemporary painter—and apparently one which few Twombly observers have recognized since.
There’s much more to be understood about how Twombly worked, and whether he worked from encountering Old Master originals, or—as Lusi suggests—from studying them in reproduction. When he offhandedly identifies the paperback source of a set of Leonardo collages Twombly made in Captiva in 1968, it makes a strong case for an entire dissertation just on Twombly’s library.
[few minutes later update] Come for the Twombly X Leonardo, stay for Femke Speelberg’s introduction to a fascinating, monumental 15th century architectural rendering which is the centerpiece of a show at the Met right now.