Cy Twombly

Galleria La Tartaruga, Rome
Private Collection, Italy
Finarte, Milan, March 13, 1975
Private Collection, Germany
Private Collection, Sweden
Sotheby's, New York, May 10, 2006, Lot 43
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

Heiner Bastian, ed., Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume II: 1961-1965, Munich, 1992, no. 125, p. 188, illustrated in color

This painting is in good condition. Please contact the deaprtment for a condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is framed in a honey blond wood frame under Plexiglas.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

"One may assume that Twombly's experience of Rome, of its living architectonic and pictorial continuity, and the contact the city offered to painters of the Renaissance, opened up fundamental perceptions which were only to find concrete expression in his works from 1960 on, after years of personal reflection." Heiner Bastian

Cy Twombly's move to Rome in 1957 provided the catalyst that effected a radical transformation in his oeuvre, igniting the touch-paper that rocketed the artist to his creative zenith in the early 1960s. Working from his studio in Piazza del Biscione, Twombly immersed himself in the intoxicating ambiance of the Eternal City whose very streets and palazzos are steeped in a rich vein of centuries of cultural history. At a time when many of his generation were turning to contemporary popular culture for inspiration, Twombly followed his forefathers in interrogating the traditional sources of Western art, looking back to Greek and Roman Antiquity and to the grandeur and decadence of the High Renaissance courtly love cycles for inspiration. Enraptured by the majestic panoramas, classical landscapes and the exalted love-cycles of High Renaissance romance, Twombly reinterpreted the canonical sources of Western art in his own distinctly personal, visual language of graphic poetry.

While many of his works from the early 1960s revisit the poetry and mythology of Classical antiquity, the present work belongs to an important series of paintings executed in 1962 which treats the assassination of Giuliano de Medici by the Pazzi clan, a historical event that has taken on mythical status in the annals of Florentine history. One of the legendary forefathers of Florence, Giuliano di Piero de' Medici was the younger brother of Lorenzo 'Il Magnifico' and between them, they shaped the rich cultural heritage of their city by commissioning many of the great masterpieces of the High Renaissance. On Easter 1478, during High Mass at Santa Maria del Fiore – il Duomo – in Florence, as worshipers bowed their heads at the elevation of the host, Giuliano was brutally stabbed nineteen times in front of the congregation by members and supporters of the Pazzi family, pawns in Pope Sixtus IV's bid to enlarge the papal territories.

In Death of Giuliano de Medici, Twombly readdresses this defining moment in our collective cultural history in a painting in which the poignant sense of tragedy emerges invigorated and renewed. Employing graphite and wax crayon as his primary tools for mark-making, Twombly references the brothers' tomb in the Church of San Lorenzo, alchemically transforming the Medici's final resting place into a mythical, visceral experience. The tomb is one of Michelangelo's masterpieces of architecture and sculpture with each brother's final resting place dramatically facing the other across a square room. Seated full-scale portraits in marble of each brother are ensconced in niches above a sloping sarcophagus on which noble figures recline in various twisting postures. One of the most resolved works from the series, in the present example the composition is unusually central and architectural, verging on the monolithic and alluding to the niche configuration of Guiliano's tomb. Yet here the graceful solidity of Michelangeo's marble forms that ornament the sarcophagus are dematerialised through Twombly's idiosyncratic syntax of ethereal broken forms. The graphite is energetically incised into the oil ground in a frenzied outpouring which hovers between raw chaos and refined lyricism. From within this calligraphic scramble, configurations of letters – reminiscent of the graffiti that Twombly witnessed in the Roman streets – emerge as transient references, fleeting memory hooks that guide interpretation like landmarks on this mythical journey. Increasingly interested in the symbolism of colour, the fleshy pink and accents of cooler blues and greens in the central rectangle here manifest the myth as sensual, tangible experience. It is through Twombly's primordial écriture automatique that the specific inspiration of Death of Giuliano de Medici transcends history and is elevated to the shared realm of myth. Through metaphor and allusion, Twombly confers on the event a universal significance that looks back to the Renaissance and its search for the utopian ideal in an idiom which is nonetheless rigorously modern.