MICROSTORY OF ART

MICROSTORY OF ART
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Dedicated to Lepanto

(Picture: wikiart.com)

(19.10.2022) Cy Twombly’s 2001 Lepanto cycle has always fascinated, but also confused me. 12 large panels that people use to describe as ›lush‹, are being dedicated to one exceedingly bloody and brutal naval battle, the 1571 Battle of Lepanto. I am trying to develop a reading here that in the end, perhaps, might make some sense to me.

(Picture: Tony Esopi)

The coastlines of the Gulf of Patras have changed since the Battle of Lepanto took place in 1571. A viewer looking out at the sea today from the coast – depending on where exactly this viewer might be standing – might actually be standing on the actual battleground, without being aware of it. And becoming aware of it, might come as a kind of shock.

And what the Lepanto cycle is providing me with (above shown is panel number IX), seems to be a similar kind of shock: what seems to be explosions of flowers at first sight, the lush vegetation of alluvial land perhaps, might turn out to be explosions of powder supplies at burning ships rather, than something as consoling as a lush vegetation in sun light at the border of the Mediterranean Sea.

I remember that once I was delved in contemplating a beautiful scenery in the botanical garden of our university – the air was soft and warm, perhaps it was spring, perhaps it was autumn – when my dreamy contemplation was disturbed by a hornet which was abducting a bumble-bee right in front of my eyes, silently, abducting it, probably already having killed it, and returning with it to the hornet’s nest which was located somewhere very high up in some kind of rather exotic tree (and it is always good to know where these things are located). As if nature would just have said to me: ›you dumb romantic aesthete, don’t you know that nature, beyond consolation, has also a lot to offer, as far as the darker sides of things are concerned?‹

It seems to me as if Twombly was playing exactly with this kind of ambivalence, with this kind of expectation to see charming sceneries in pictures or in nature, by offering a picture that might seem to invite to a contemplation of beautiful things at first sight, but turning out to be a reflection of the simultaneous presence of beauty and horror instead. And thus the Lepanto cycle might be called lush, but its colors do seem to serve only as a kind of lure. To contemplate something else: not necessarily the darker side of things in itself, but rather the simultaneous presence of beauty and horror that might confuse us, and that we might confuse (being unable to see the darker side of things).

The tapestries that, among other things, might have inspired the cycle, do also show viewers in one corner that, from a coast, look down at a majestic fleet, and, as someone born at a city with a maritime history, I am wondering with what kind of feelings these viewers might have looked down at this majestic sight. It seems to me that also these tapestries, if in a different way than Twombly, at least marginally did ask similar questions: what actually is it that we do see and why and what relation do we have with what we are seeing? I am paraphrasing Rilke here, just as Twombly might have – freely – paraphrased Rilke in his Lepanto cycle: is the majestic (the lush) not only the beginning of (just one step removed from) the horror?

(Picture: Zairon)

MICROSTORY OF ART
ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM
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