The Importance of The story of Leda and swan in the Art..

The Importance of The story of Leda and Swan in the Art..

The story of Leda and the swan was extremely popular in both renaissance and baroque art

Leda

Leda was the Queen of Sparta and wife to Tyndareus. She was the daughter of Aetolian King Thestius. With Jupiter she had Castor, Pollux, and Helen, and with Tyndareus she had Clytemenstra. Not much about Leda is known other than her relations with Jupiter.

While Leda, wife of Tyndareus, king of Sparta, was bathing in a pond near the river Eurotas, was seduced and possessed by a glowing white swan who argued being chased by an eagle. That swan was Zeus, that this deception Leda conquered without arousing suspicion. Since that night he lay with her husband, later gave birth to two eggs. In one of them were Helen and Pollux (sons of Zeus and therefore immortal), and the other Castor and Clytemnestra (mortal Spartan king's sons). Castor and Pollux, 

Jupiter

Jupiter is the god of sky and thunder, while also being the most important and powerful god. He was the main god of Rome and the Jupiter Optimus Maximus on Capitoline Hill is the largest temple dedicated to him. Jupiter was the protector of the Roman empire. He came down from the heavens in many different forms and impregnated many different women.

The relationship between Jupiter and Leda is much different from normal husband wife relationships. Jupiter presented himself to Leda as a swan. Jupiter seduced Leda resulting in Leda laying two eggs. After inpregnating her, he left and went back up to the heavens. The two eggs hatched into Helen and Polydeuces.

Jupiter and Leda are the parents to the well known Helen and Pollux. Their relationship was quite unsual, as Jupiter came down to Leda in the body of a swan. We now have a planet named Jupiter, with a moon named Leda.

Eroticism

The subject undoubtedly owed its sixteenth-century popularity to the paradox that it was considered more acceptable to depict a woman in the act of copulation with a swan than with a man. The earliest depictions show the pair love-making with some explicitness—more so than in any depictions of a human pair made by artists of high quality in the same period. The fate of the erotic album I Modi some years later shows why this was so. The theme remained a dangerous one in the Renaissance, as the fates of the three best known paintings on the subject demonstrate. The earliest depictions were all in the more private medium of the old master print, and mostly from Venice. They were often based on the extremely brief account in the Metamorphosesof Ovid (who does not imply a rape), though Lorenzo de' Medici had both a Roman sarcophagus and an antique carved gem of the subject, both with reclining Ledas.

The earliest known explicit Renaissance depiction is one of the many woodcut illustrations to Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a book published in Venice in 1499. This shows Leda and the Swan making love with gusto, despite being on top of a triumphal car, being pulled along and surrounded by a considerable crowd. An engraving dating to 1503 at the latest, by Giovanni Battista Palumba, also shows the couple in coitus, but in deserted countryside Another engraving, certainly from Venice and attributed by many to Giulio Campagnola, shows a love-making scene, but there Leda's attitude is highly ambiguous. Palumba made another engraving in about 1512, presumably influenced by Leonardo's sketches for his earlier composition, showing Leda seated on the ground and playing with her children.

There were also significant depictions in the smaller decorative arts, also private media. Benvenuto Cellini made a medallion, now in Vienna, early in his career, and Antonio Abondio one on the obverse of a medal celebrating a Roman courtesan

In Painting

Leonardo da Vinci began making studies in 1504 for a painting, apparently never executed, of Leda seated on the ground with her children. In 1508 he painted a different composition of the subject, with a nude standing Leda cuddling the Swan, with the two sets of infant twins (also nude), and their huge broken egg-shells. The original of this is lost, probably deliberately destroyed, and was last recorded in the French royal Château de Fontainebleau in 1625 by Cassiano dal Pozzo. However it is known from many copies, of which the earliest are probably the Spiridon Leda, perhaps by a studio assistant and now in the Uffizi and the one at Wilton House in England (illustrated).

Also lost, and probably deliberately destroyed, is Michelangelo's tempera painting of the pair making love, commissioned in 1529 by Alfonso d'Este for his palazzo in Ferrara, and taken to France for the royal collection in 1532; it was at Fontainebleau in 1536. Michelangelo's cartoon for the work—given to his assistant Antonio Mini, who used it for several copies for French patrons before his death in 1533—survived for over a century. This composition is known from many copies, including an ambitious engraving by Cornelis Bos, c. 1563; the marble sculpture by Bartolomeo Ammanati in the Bargello, Florence; two copies by the young Rubens on his Italian voyage, and the painting after Michelangelo, ca. 1530, in the National Gallery, London.The Michelangelo composition, of about 1530, shows Mannerist tendencies of elongation and twisted pose (the figura serpentinata) that were popular at the time. In addition, a sculptural group, similar to the Prado Roman group illustrated, was believed until at least the 19th century to be by Michelangelo.

The last very famous Renaissance painting of the subject is Correggio's elaborate composition of c. 1530 (Berlin); this too was damaged whilst in the collection of Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, the Regent of France in the minority of Louis XV. His son Louis, though a great lover of painting, had periodic crises of conscience about his way of life, in one of which he attacked the figure of Leda with a knife. The damage has been repaired, though full restoration to the original condition was not possible. Both the Leonardo and Michelangelo paintings also disappeared when in the collection of the French Royal Family, and are believed to have been destroyed by more moralistic widows or successors of their owners.

There were many other depictions in the Renaissance, including cycles of book illustrations to Ovid, but most were derivative of the compositions mentioned above. The subject remained largely confined to Italy, and sometimes France – Northern versions are rare..After something of a hiatus in the 18th and early 19th centuries (apart from a very sensuous Boucher, Leda and the Swan became again a popular motif in the later 19th and 20th centuries, with many Symbolist and Expressionist treatments.

Modern Art

Cy Twombly executed an abstract version of Leda and the Swan in 1962. It is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Avant-garde filmmaker Kurt Kren along with other members of the Viennese Actionist movement, including Otto Muehl and Hermann Nitsch, made a film-performance called 7/64 Leda mit der Schwan in 1964. The film retains the classical motif, portraying, for most of its duration, a young woman embracing a swan.Photographer Charlie White included a portrait of Leda in his "And Jeopardize the Integrity of the Hull" series. Zeus, as the swan, only appears metaphorically. There is a life-sized marble statue of Leda and the Swan at the Jai Vilas Palace Museum in Gwalior, Northern Madhya Pradesh, India Bristol Museum and Art Gallery currently exhibits Karl Weschke's Leda and the Swan, painted in 1986.

Boucher's painting..

In 1742, Boucher submitted this picture to the Salon for exhibition. It is a refined and delicate painting, finished in a manner appropriate to its rather modest size. Immediately hailed as a masterpiece, Boucher made a copy which was shipped to Sweden in June 1742 where it has remained ever since. The original was throught to have been lost but was discovered and identified in the 1980s. Its free style and soft contours make it one of Boucher's loveliest. The story of Leda and the swan was extremely popular in both renaissance and baroque art, but Boucher has presented the subject with unerring pictoral instinct, obviously less concerned with sticking to the original story. Nowhere in the various accounts of Jupiter's seduction of Leda, wife of King Tydnareus of Sparta by the god taking the form of a swan, is there mention of a second female as beautiful as Leda herself. And although by their coupling, Leda and Jupiter would produce Castor and Pollux as well as Helen and Clytaemnestra, Boucher's painting hints at none of this. Unlike most representations of the scene, Cupid, the little god of love, is nowhere present. Nor does this craning swan invoke the usual menacing lust of the most powerful of the gods. Indeed the swan is depicted in a way which seems deliberately calculated to contradict the phallic symbolism of its outstreteched neck.

By the addition of a second female figure, Boucher produced a sumptuous pyramid of flesh and luxurious raiment, but whose erotic overtones are somewhat tempered by the pastoral setting. Indeed the swan seems more like a domestic pet than a god about to rape Leda.