MYTHOLOGY (noun.)
1. a collection of myths, especially one belonging to a particular religious or cultural tradition.
2. the study of myths
─ IN WHICH THE ADMINS GIVE YOU INFORMATION PERTAINING TO THE MANY BELIEFS OF MULTIPLE MMYTHOLOGIES
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LEDA AND THE SWAN
The story and a subject in art in which the god Zeus, in the form of a swan, seduces Leda.
According to later 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.
In a version of the mythology, it is suggested that Clytemnestra, had somehow been traumatized by what the swan did to her mother.
It is said that Leda laid two eggs from which Helen and Polydeuces hatched.
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 during the same time period.
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 painting a different composition of the subject, with a nude Leda standing 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 Chateau de Fontaineleau in 1625 by Cassiano dal Pozzo. However it is known from its many copies.
Also lost, and probably destroyed was 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 know from many copies.
The last famous Renaissance painting of the subject is Correggio's elaborate composition, this too was damaged whilst in the collection of Phillippe II, Duke of Orleans, the Regend of France in the minority of Louis XV. This song 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 damaged has since 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 eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries, Leda and the Swan became a popular motif, with many Symbolist and Expressionist treatment.
IN MODERN ART There is a life-sized marble statue of Leda and the Swan at the Jai Vilas Palace Museum in India.
American artist and photographer, created the "Bird" series in 1983, a Jean Cocteau-influenced collection of photographs that exploded the Leda and the Swan myth in tightly cropped, voyeuristic images of a nude female and an undefinable birdlike creature hinting at intimacy.
IN MODERN MEDIA A version of the Leda and the Swan story is the foundation myth in the television series, Orphan Black.
