Cy Twombly's oeuvre featuring paintings, sculptures, works on paper and photographs displays a highly personal, literary character, but has undergone several profound transformations. The most decisive was the contact with Mediterranean culture caused by Twombly's with drawal from the New York art scene??????he moved to Italy in 1957. Greek gods, the Mediterranean light, Western history, literature and mythology all found their way into his art. In ever larger canvases he presents the drama of humanity as a sensuous and poetic vision of color, drawing and writing. At the occasion of Twombly's 80th birthday in 2008, our four-volume Catalogue Raisonn???? of the Paintings will be supplemented by a fifth volume covering the period 1996??????2006 and thus, among others, his famous Lepanto and Bacchus cycles.