"... Something nice with swans" - visions of Leda and her avian friend

 

(Note: This post, its title taken from my beloved "Sunday in the Park with George", was finished and scheduled well before Sondheim's death... a strange and poignant coincidence.)

Heinrich Lossow, before 1897.

...And often not so nice. Leda's coupling with that randy Zeus - this go 'round disguised as an elegant but aggressive water fowl - is one of mythology's many weird and decidedly icky stories. Right from the very beginning, though, artists have been inspired to retell the scandalous tale; countless interpretations of the story exist. Many of them are quite graphic, the story itself being a ready excuse. Told in paint and stone and metal. With Ledas tender and confused, ecstatic and traumatized. This is just a tiny selection.

Odilon Redon, 1910.

Unknown artist, third century AD.

Veronese, circa 1585.

Leonardo da Vinci, circa 1506.

Paul Cézanne, circa 1880.

Théodore Géricault, circa 1817.

Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, circa 1870.

Arturo Michelena, 1887.

François Lemoyne, before 1737.

Francisco Viera Portuense, circa 1800.

Copy of a lost painting by Michelangelo, after 1530.

Peter Paul Rubens - obviously based on the same lost Michelangelo - before 1600.

Paul Mathias Padua, 1939.

Attributed to Gillis Coignet, circa 1592-99. (Unrestored and restored.)

Franz Russ the Younger, circa second half of the nineteenth century.

François Boucher, 1742.

Léon François Comerre, 1908.

Étienne-Maurice Falconet, circa 1764-66.

Gianbettino Cignaroli, circa second quarter of the eighteenth century.

Lelio Orsi, circa 1560.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1895.

Hans Zatzka, before 1945.

Correggio, circa 1530-31.

Louis Frederick Grell, 1937.

 François-Édouard Picot, 1832.

Antoine Coypel, before 1722.

Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller, 1783.

Georg Pencz, circa first half of the sixteenth century.

Louis Icart, 1934.

Cesare da Sesto, after Leonardo da Vinci, circa 1515.

 Francesco d'Ubertino Verdi, called Bachiacca, circa 1518-20.

Henri Paul Motte, 1900.

William Shackleton, 1928.

Unknown artist, circa third or fourth century AD.

Adolf Erbslöh, 1909.

Wilfred Gabriel de Glehn, circa first half of the twentieth century. 

*

Perhaps understandable considering the subject matter - ? - this appears to have a subject only rarely taken up by women artists. Marie Laurencin - whose work I don't honestly care for - painted a handful of Ledas; sadly, hers were actually the only examples by a female hand that I could find.

Marie Laurencin, 1923.