This drawing is from a series that includes collaged photographic illustrations of Leonardo da Vinci’s sketchbooks. Italian art captivated Cy Twombly, especially after he moved permanently to Rome in 1957. He was fascinated by Leonardo’s anatomical and scientific drawings, which are both graphic and abstract, and used them as springboards for his own creativity.
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Here Twombly attached a reproduction of Leonardo’s sketch of the peripheral nerves of the leg, turned sideways so it is no longer recognizable as an anatomical study. He drew horizontal lines of varying length and density onto this image, echoing lines on the bottom half of the sheet. Sequences of numbers, including the date of the work (24-12-71), appear in several places. These and the artist’s initials at the upper left become pictorial elements, as does the white of the paper itself. Though entirely abstract, the work reads as a landscape, with horizontal lines and masses of marks suggesting topographical undulations.
