Cy Twombly: Hero and Leander 1985
I picture Cy Twombly starting to paint the scene. He turns off the lights in his studio. He will paint in complete darkness, and closes his eyes. He stands at the easel, at the empty canvas with the brush in his hand. Perhaps Twombly knows Marlowe’s poem from heart and recites it. From the blackness appears a dim, flickering light, a candle or a torch. Summer breeze whispers of the ancient gods…..
Hero lightened a torch in her tower every night to show Leander the way to her in the darkness. They were the most desirable creatures of all, bearing unearthly beauty: Hero, a priestess, Leander, a prince, and a love forbidden consuming both of them. They lived in two cities facing each other from the two sides of a sea strait.
Leander came every night to her. He clashed the surging waves of the sea with his arms. He crossed the strait swimming naked.From the first night he came, so little she resisted; they loved each other night after night, leaving daylights unavailing. “It lies not in our power to love or hate/For will in us is overruled by fate”, Leander said to Hero. And fate ruled their happiness to end, as their love was so powerful it would have reached the gods and would have made the lovers eternal as well. No.
As the summer was pushed away by the cool autumn, the shore’s nights became harsher. No more warm breeze, only mean winds that scourged the sea, but Leander went to her anyway. What could stop a young heart and body to meet his love? But it was not to be.
The wind blew out Hero’s torch in the tower and Leander lost his way. The whitely crowned waves, so jealous of their love, grabbed him and took him to the bottom of the sea and kept Leander there until the sea had him entirely.
Although Kit Marlowe never finished his poem because he was killed before he could, we know the story’s end from other poets.
Next morning was a beautiful, calm one with clear blue sky above the strait. Hero found her lover’s dead-white body at the shore and just stood there for long minutes over him, until finally she went up to her tower wanly and voicelessly. She walked to the light and threw herself down.
When Cy Twombly opened his eyes he saw the white waves washing his canvas in chaotic mass, and he saw pure blood draining on the shore, white and red trickling like tears. Beyond them, somewhere underneath the whiteness and the blood, lie Hero and Leander.