Cy Twombly: Lepanto Poster

This poster reproduces Naumachia (1992), a tempera and pencil work on paper by Cy Twombly, made in 2002 for the exhibition Cy Twombly: Lepanto at Gagosian's 555 West 24th Street gallery in New York.

The exhibition presented Lepanto, a painting in twelve parts first shown at the 49th Biennale di Venezia in the summer of 2001, which depicts the sixteenth-century naval battle in which the combined European fleet under Venetian command defeated the Ottoman navy. Naumachia is a related work on paper rather than one of the twelve panels, its title borrowed from the staged sea battles once mounted for public entertainment in ancient Rome.

Twombly (1928–2011) returned to classical and military history across his career, from the Fifty Days at Iliam paintings of the 1970s to Lepanto's later treatment of empire and combat. The New York exhibition brought the cycle, painted and first exhibited in Venice the year before, to his primary American gallery.