Codex Twombly

I have been waiting since February, when greg.org hero Jack sent along the link to the Master Drawings Symposium, for video of this year’s Ricciardi Prize lecture by Giovanni Lusi. I finally watched it, and it’s great. While everyone else was distracted by the Richter, Giovanni Lusi was reading the spines of Twombly’s bookshelf. Screenshot from his 2026 Drawing Masters Symposium lecture via vimeo Of course, anyone who reconstructs the period library of Cy Twombly by analyzing the spines on a bookshelf in the 1966 Vogue Horst photoshoot is going to have my attention. Lusi’s work goes beyond the circumstantial to trace Twombly’s early, formative engagement in Rome with the works of Old Masters—in this case, Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and codices. Screenshot of a slide from Giovanni Lusi’s 2026 Drawing Masters Symposium lecture showing a page from Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus and Twombly’s Delian Ode 55, 1961, which was shown in Geneva in 1963. The brochure has a collage of Twombly’s…