Leda and the Swan

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Leda and the Swan

copy after a lost original by Michelangelo, after 1530

105.4 × 141 cm

Leda and the Swan is a motif from Greek mythology, in which Zeus came to Leda in the form of a swan. The motif was rarely seen in Gothic art, but resurfaced as a classicizing theme, with erotic overtones, in Italian painting and sculpture of the 16th Century.

1 In painting
2 In poetry
3 Notes
4 External links

[edit] In painting

The most familiar examples are the copies of Leonardo da Vinci's lost painting, with the two sets of infant twins, 1508; Correggio's elaborate composition of c. 1530 (Berlin); and two versions of a lost Michelangelo that is also known from an engraving by Cornelis de Bos, c. 1563; the marble sculpture by Bartolomeo Ammanati in the Bargello, Florence; and the painting after Michelangelo, c. 1530, in the National Gallery, London. The Michelangelo composition is a definitive example of Mannerism.

Leda and the Swan furnished a common motif for the rapidly unfolding visual arts into the 19th century.

[edit] In poetry

Leda and the Swan

copy after a lost original by Leonardo, 1515-1520

Oil on canvas

112 × 86 cm

Galleria Borghese, Rome

"Leda And The Swan" is a poem by William Butler Yeats first published in 1924. Reviving what had become an insipid classical cliché by combining psychological realism with a mystic vision, it describes the swan's mating with Leda.

According to later Greek mythology, Leda bore Helen and Polydeuces, children of Zeus while at the same time bearing Castor and Clytemnestra, children of her husband Tyndareus, the King of Sparta. As the story goes, Zeus took the form of a swan and slept with Leda on the same night as her husband, King Tyndareus. In some versions, she laid two eggs from which the children hatched. In other versions, Helen is a daughter of Nemesis, the goddess who personified the disaster that awaited those suffering from the pride of Hubris.

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower^[1]

And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

[edit] Notes

^ "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/ And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?" (Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus). Both Helen and Clytemnestra were Leda's daughters.