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Abstract
Cy Twombly's permanent installation of ten paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art has been well-studied for its use of Homer's Iliad as a canonical source, as well as the interplay of word and image. Attentive to the repetition of circular forms, especially Twombly's rendition of the ekphrastic shield of Achilles, this thesis charts the shield’s evolution into the flower-like “shades” of the warriors on the large-scale painting, Shades of Achilles, Patroclus, and Hector, on the Eastern wall, and their phallic embodiment on the battlefields and links this evolution, as well as the cycle’s relationship to the art world’s contemporaneous transition from Abstract Expressionism to the aesthetics of Pop Art and Postmodernism more generally.