After Michelangelo, Leda and the Swan

Michelangelo painted a panel picture of Leda and the swan for Alfonso I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. The Duke had recently received the Worship of Venus (Prado, Madrid), Bacchus and Ariadne, and the Bacchanal of the Andrians (Prado, Madrid) from Titian. In accepting the commission, Michelangelo was competing directly with Titian, and he completed the painting by October 1530. The exact size of the painting is not known but Condivi, Michelangelo’s later biographer, says it was very large.

However, after falling out with the Duke’s representative, Michelangelo gave both the painting and its cartoon to his pupil, Antonio Mini, who took them with him to France. Neither the cartoon nor the painting survived, although we know the composition from a detailed engraving by Cornelis Bos. Only one detailed study by Michelangelo survives – a drawing in red chalk of a youth’s head bending forwards (Casa Buonarotti, Florence), which appears to be about half the size of the original painting.

The National Gallery’s picture is an old copy, made after the original painting or its cartoon, and is very badly damaged in places. In it we see the Greek god Zeus in the form of a swan seducing Leda. According to legend, Leda bore Helen and Polydeuces, children of Zeus, and, at the same time, Castor and Clytemnestra, the children of her husband Tyndareus, King of Sparta. The hatchlings Castor and Polydeuces were included in Michelangelo’s original composition. Leda’s pose seems to derive from sarcophagus reliefs and gems, and is similar to that of Michelangelo’s marble Night (Medici Chapel, Florence) completed in 1531.

Titian’s Danäe (Capodimonte, Naples) appears to have been made in response to Michelangelo’s Leda. Where Michelangelo’s Leda seems akin to a hard-edged marble relief sculpture, Titian’s Danäe is meltingly voluptuous, emphasising colour and light. Michelangelo saw the Danäe in Rome in 1545, praising its colouring, naturalness and power to entrance but criticising the draughtsmanship.

It is possible that the National Gallery’s painting may be a copy made from Michelangelo’s original cartoon by Rosso Fiorentino; the Italian patron of the arts, Cassiano del Pozzo, on his visit to Fontainebleau in 1625 spoke of a Leda there by Rosso painted after a drawing by Michelangelo. At the end of the seventeenth century it was said that the original was burnt by Des Noyers, Superintendant of Fontainebleau, on the grounds of indecency. We have no evidence whether this was the case.

When the Duke of Northumberland presented this painting to the National Gallery in 1838, he stated that it was not suitable for public exhibition. For this reason it does not appear in any National Gallery catalogue published before 1915.