Vor exactly 450 years ago, the Battle of Lepanto took place on October 7, 1571 in the Ionian Sea in what is now Greece. It testifies to their enduring myth that not only is a Gran Reserva Brandy named after the battle, but also that in 2001 the American painter Cy Twombly showed a gigantic, twelve-part Lepanto cycle at the Venice Biennale. Lepanto, where the fleet of the Holy League, consisting of the papacy, Spain and Venice, surprisingly defeated the seemingly overpowering Turks, was a Pyrrhic victory. Because although the League won the battle, it lost the war and could not stop the expansion of the Ottomans in the eastern Mediterranean. On the contrary, just two years later, Venice was forced to make a peace treaty with the Turks, on humble terms, as the former Queen of the Seas accepted the loss of Cyprus, the trigger of the conflict, and even undertook to make enormous reparation payments.
On a symbolic level, however, Lepanto was a far-reaching propaganda success. The Holy League succeeded in stylizing the battle as a victory for Christianity against the unbelieving “Muslims”. After decades of constant defeat, Lepanto served as a sign that the seemingly unstoppable expansion of the invincible Turks in the Mediterranean and thus the Islamization of Europe could still be stopped. Even centuries later, Lepanto was celebrated throughout Catholic Europe, and the Lepanto ringing is still used in many churches today.
Ships soaked in blood
Twombly, who has lived in Italy since 1958, must have been familiar with the meaning of Lepanto, especially since the myth has never died down here. In Italy every city has a Lepanto Square, as the Holy League still served as a symbol of identity for the newly unified nation in the nineteenth century. The parallels were made particularly strong in the Italo-Turkish War in 1912. Gaeta, a coastal town between Rome and Naples, where he lived until his death in 2011, is also the proud owner of a standard used in battle. For him, who has long been interested in ships and naval wars, also because the US Navy was constantly passing by in front of his window on the way to their base in Gaeta, Lepanto must have been an obvious topic for the biennial contribution.
However, Twombly does not show the battle between Christianity and Islam in the cycle. There are no opponents in the pictures and not even a battle. Instead, only victims appear, burning ships soaked in blood, as if riddled with cannon strikes. His pictures have seldom been as concrete as they are here, and they are never so aggressive, drastic, even obsessive in their intrusiveness. In his late work, his gestural style of painting, which deals with Abstract Expressionism, loses its airy and lyrical moment. Delicate doodles now give way to rough shapes and color explosions carved with a thick brush. But even in the later work there is hardly ever the intensity or even aggressiveness of “Lepanto”, in which the maltreated canvases seem to almost bleed.
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