Untitled

Painted in Rome in October of 1961, four years after his permanent move to the Caput Mundi, Untitled is a magisterial display of Cy Twombly’s acclimation into the Mediterranean environment. The painting reveals Twombly’s burgeoning Baroque style and his newfound enthusiasm for vivid pigmentation and animated, gestural forcefulness following the cool, austere classicism of his work from the previous decade. Painted in tandem with many of Twombly’s most seminal works—including Triumph of Galatea (1961, Menil Collection, Houston), The First Part of the Return from Parnassus (1961, Art Institute of Chicago) and the Ferragosto series—Untitled divulges the American artist’s complete enthrallment with his Roman domain as he embraced a new grandeur and decadence which wavers between bright exultation and dark physicality. 1961 witnesses Twombly at his apotheosis, before entering a more somber and anxious period marked with violent subjects the following year. As Twombly’s catalogue raisonné editor Heiner Bastian writes, “In 1961, but only four years after the first Rome paintings, the tow of the Mediterranean world comes to embody an intangible beauty as well as the sense of its forlornness. Twombly’s works have found an innate center, meridians whose scant traces were but fleetingly perceived earlier. The transformation completed in these paintings shatters with weightless epigrammatic analogy of those limpid flashes and lingering appropriations and detects a fervent expression in the tragedy and metamorphosis of mutating, ever fateful identities. By moments, the metaphysical meaning of the myth reaches an extreme, the sense of a code that cries out for deciphering; or, at times, it addresses solely the artist’s vocation: its affectations, ruptures, disjunctures, bewilderment—all that [Theodor] Adorno calls ‘the very high and the very low’” (Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume II, 1961-1965, Berlin, 1993, p. 24).

Relentless swirls of graphite crest across the surface of Untitled in tempestuous waves unleashing the force of nature. Bold gestural marks in rich, luscious pigment insinuate themselves into and against the graphic underlayers, stratifying the canvas surface into an amazement of palimpsestuous depths like those of an excavated ancient city. The composition proceeds centripetally, Twombly’s churning strokes and laconic splashes of paint increasing in tempo and density as they reach the center of the canvas. The artist incorporates corporeal and earthy colors into his composition, with deposits of fleshy pink and blood-like red pigment scattered across the canvas, skillfully incorporated within his broader tempo. “I take the color as primary... if it’s blood, it’s red; if it’s earth, it’s brown,” Twombly explained in a late interview (quoted in C. Kondoleon, “Color and Line, Gods and Poetry,” in Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2022, p. 26). Minute speckles of blue in the center and to the center right of the canvas metamorphose into the “blue silver vapor” which Twombly described of the Roman atmosphere in a 1957 letter to the art dealer Eleanor Ward (quoted in N. Cullinan, Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters, exh. cat., Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 2011, p. 94). The richly varied hues of white omnipresent through exposed ground, impastoed peaks, and runny stretches of paint recall the austere whiteness of Carrara marble or the crumbled vestiges of Roman monuments. White, the most important color in Twombly’s oeuvre, evokes the bright Mediterranean sun, the “crumbling chalk, bleached bone, and eroded lime” of Rome (K. Varnedoe, quoted in C. Kondoleon, op. cit., p. 27). Twombly ascribed a deeper meaning to white in a 1957 statement: “whiteness can be the classic state of the intellect, or a neo-romantic area of remembrance—or as the symbolic whiteness of Mallarmé,” who considered the color to represent uncertainty (quoted in N. Cullinan, Twombly and Poussin, op. cit., p. 106).

Time embodied as media appears over the course of countless layers of paint superimposed over Twombly’s embodied gestures—crossing out, scribbling, blurring, blotching, writing, inscribing. Obscure symbols—the outline of a crown, a red cockerel, a barely-sketched window, a vague entranceway, Bacchic signs—emerge from this crescendo of formal and substantial strata. One’s eyes scan gestures, signs, and script in a vain search for clarity, excavating layer upon layer of Twombly’s densely stratified marks in what Roland Barthes describes as a “perverse sort of palimpsest,” or Charles Olson as an “inverted archaeology” (R. Barthes, “Non Multa Sed Multum,” in N. Del Roscio, ed., Writings on Cy Twombly, Munich, 2002, p. 94; ibid., p. 13). As Thierry Grueb eloquently writes, we witness across the canvas “Twombly’s search for clues of the past by means of gestures, signs, and script,” which “give rise to multifarious antiquities, multilayered palimpsests whose restoration remains overshadowed by a failure of memory and the impossibility of approximation. Like an excavation site, the fragments of these ‘depth soundings’ convey concrete references, create a reality of an incredible power of evocation and breadth of association that simultaneously always remains a fragile, phantasmagorical imagination” (“Cy Twombly’s Antiquities,” in J. Storsve, Cy Twombly, exh. cat., Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2016, p. 104).

Inscribing “Roma” into the bottom of the canvas, Twombly makes clear in Untitled his reverence towards his adapted home. Rome beckoned Twombly as the Eternal City had drawn countless artists and writers before him to find boundless inspiration among the city’s mythic ruins. Echoing a formidable tradition, stretching from Giotto and Fra Angelico, through Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio, and Rubens to Poussin and Turner, it was only with prolonged contact with Rome’s splendor and decadence that Twombly produced his most seminal masterpieces. Settling in the ancient city, Twombly found himself at the epicenter of Western mythology and history, the “Caput Mundi,” or capital of the world, allowing him to discover a new dimension to his previously austere paintings. He first developed his signature gestural script while painting in Rome, incorporating expressive graphic marks while incising names from myths, poetic citations, and other antiquarian addenda. He would continue to develop this script through the remainder of the decade to produce his celebrated Blackboard paintings. He simultaneously began to explicitly reference his artistic forebears, citing the titles and compositions to Raphael’s famous frescoes and Nicolas Poussin’s vaunted history paintings in works such as Triumph of Galatea and Empire of Flora, both from 1961. As the curator Nicholas Cullinan aptly notes, “By choosing instead to move from his native country to Rome (just as Poussin had done before him) Twombly found a way to reinvigorate the aesthetic language of Abstract Expressionism and integrate this with European myth, history, and culture. Thus Twombly is involved in a continued dialogue with the past as part of an effort to render these myths as being freshly relevant for a contemporary audience” (“Notes on Painting,” in N. Cullinan, Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters, exh. cat., Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 2011, p. 26).

Twombly first entered under Rome’s triumphal arches in 1952 while on a Mediterranean tour with his companion and fellow artist Robert Rauschenberg. In his first letter home after arriving, Twombly wrote: “I finally arrived in Roma and have a large room in a pensione overlooking Piazza di Spagna a block off via Margutta where most of the important Italian painters and sculptors have studios,” which he was using as a base to immerse himself in the city’s “Baroque architecture, and Roman ruins” (C. Twombly, quoted in N. Cullinan, op. cit., pp. 28-29). Photographs dated that year taken by Rauschenberg show Twombly fascinated with the ancient urban fabric of the city, dutifully studying the sculptural fragments of Constantine at the Campidoglio and descending the Spanish Steps, both in the vicinity of his apartment. Twombly’s astonishment upon his arrival, and his intense fascination with Rome’s fragmentary past, parallels Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s revelations on his first arrival to the city, the famed author writing, “as soon as one sees with one’s own eyes the whole which one had hitherto only known in fragments and chaotically, a new life begins” (quoted in M. Jacobus, “Akephalos/ The Headless One,” in Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, op. cit., pp. 102-103).

In the spring of 1957, Twombly set sail from New York to return to Rome, abandoning the new global capital of the art world for the erstwhile Eternal City still recovering from the ravages of the Second World War. The artist, having studied the first generation of Abstract Expressionists—including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline—left to seek artistic and aesthetic rejuvenation amid the grand Baroque spaces and enduring artistic legacy still visible in the ancient city. He married the Roman aristocrat Luisa Tatiana Franchetti in 1959, with whom he had his son Cyrus Alessandro, born in Rome in December 1959. The following year, the young family moved to a seventeenth-century apartment, a short stroll from the Villa Farnesina where frescoes including Raphael’s Galatea and his studio’s libidinous Loggia frescoes still reside. Photographs taken of the home for Vogue by Horst P. Horst in 1965 reveal the artist living in communion with the past, Roman antiquities, neoclassical furniture, and his new paintings seamlessly integrated into a profoundly compelling mélange of past and present. His interior design echoes a contemporary description of the artist as “born out of our time, rather than into it” (quoted in N. Cullinan, op. cit., p. 31). While surrounding himself with the fragmentary evidence of the past, Twombly also explored the depths of classical literature, closely reading the lines of Herodotus, Homer, and Horace along with Ovid and Virgil and Goethe and Keats. Fusing poetry and painting, following Horace’s famous phrase “Ut pictura poesis [as is painting, so is poetry],” Twombly began to inscribe lines from his favorite authors directly into his painted compositions (Ars Poetica, I. 361).

Twombly was not the lone American artist finding inspiration in Rome. Mark Rothko spent around eight months in the city across his three European voyages. Asked where Rothko’s fidelity to the Renaissance tradition originated, the artist’s son Christopher Rothko responded: “It starts in Rome, which he loves, in part because it’s a little bit like New York... but it is also so steeped in history. And he walked not just through all the churches, again, having this conversation with the great Italian masters of painting in fresco, but also through ancient Roman history” (quoted in “Mark Rotko and Fra Angelico—An Encounter in Spiritual Spaces,” Frieze Masters Podcast, series 4, episode 2, 4 December 2025, online). Another titan of the New York School, Willem de Kooning, was similarly enraptured by the city, spending a months-long sojourn in 1959-60 after first visiting for only a few days. “I felt I had to return to Rome right away, because the city made an enormous impression on me... I felt such an urgent need to return. I felt that it was difficult to enter this splendid city, to succeed in deeply penetrating it without being rejected. I didn’t want to stop at superficial impressions, to understand it and its inhabitants” (quoted in G. Garrels, “Willem de Kooning and Italy: An Introduction,” in Willem de Kooning and Italy, exh. cat., Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, 2024, p. 18). Unlike his compatriots, Twombly was no ephemeral pilgrim taking in Rome’s delights. He accomplished what de Kooning sought to do, establishing himself so deeply within the social, historical, and artistic fabric of the city that he became Roman. His successful adoption into the Eternal City sets his oeuvre apart from all of his contemporaries; bridging New York abstraction with the Roman antiquarian tradition, he created unparalleled masterpieces of twentieth century art.

“Rome is unfindable, the nonpareil,” writes the scholar Leonard Barkan. “It is the map of the world, but it cannot be mapped and therefore renders the world unmappable... What survives of Rome is literally tombs, while to render Rome in poetry may be to extract it from the tomb or simply to provide another kind of tomb” (Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, New Haven, 1999, p. xxviii). By opening the space of his canvases for the ghosts of the past to inhabit, summoning mythic figures and antique forms from their various sources, Twombly makes visible a map of Rome’s past, conjuring gods and heroes from cultural memory. His scribbled marks, suggesting texts descending into illegibility, evoke his host city, paralleling a profound lineage of authors, including Petrarch, Raphael, Titian, and Goethe, whose pens struggled to capture what their eyes could hardly believe. “Even to myself, I hardly dared to admit where I was going and all the way I was still afraid I might be dreaming” Goethe wrote, newly arrived in Rome (Italian Journey, trans. W. H. Auden and E. Mayer, Harmondsworth, 1985, p. 128).

For the art historian Simon Schama, Twombly’s Rome “consists of the pleasure of its ruins; the attack of weedy nature on the defaced wreckage of the classical tradition, limning antiquity to get at Dionysiac archaisms of an arcadia where Eros and Thanatos are the closest of chums and where the spilling of blood and semen blossom into Bacchic horticulture” (“Cy Twombly,” in N. del Rocio, ed., The Essential Cy Twombly, New York, 2014, p. 11). Untitled basks in sumptuous revelry, each mark an indicator of a bodily process as Twombly turned to his bare hands as instruments to create a more visceral experience. The artist’s embodied mark-making marches in tandem with his scribbled text and ebullient symbols to establish a sensuous, intoxicating, Priapean beauty. “In fact writing in itself, writing about Rome, and writing about a supposedly nonexistent Rome is eros in a tradition that goes back to a letter of Petrarch... the less there is of material Rome, whether historical, urbanological, or aesthetic, the greater the space for the poet” continues Barkan (L. Barkan, op. cit., p. xxix). Untitled reveals Twombly at his most lyrical, working as a poet-painter to excavate the spaces hidden in-between the city’s historical fabric.

Twombly’s Untitled articulates a consummate Roman idiom in which gestural inscription, chromatic accretion, and the rhetoric of classicism coalesce into a hermeneutic field. Its densely stratified surface—at once excavation and palimpsest—renders the pictorial ground a site where Baroque exuberance overlays earlier austerities, and where mythic citation, corporeal mark‑making, and the spectator’s deciphering gaze operate in concert. In this apotheotic moment, Twombly reinvigorates Abstract Expressionist energies within a Mediterranean grammar of remembrance, converting the canvas into an arena of continual return in which past and present cohabitate.