Leda and the Swan

The motif of Leda and the Swan from Greek mythology, in which the Greek god Zeus came to Leda in the form of a swan, was rarely seen in Gothic art, but resurfaced as a classicizing theme, with erotic overtones, in Italian painting and sculpture of the 16th Century. The most familiar examples are the copies of Leonardo da Vinci's lost painting, with the two sets of infant twins; Correggio's elaborate composition of ca 1530 (Berlin); and two versions of a lost Michelangelo that is known from an engraving by Cornelis de Bos, ca 1563: the marble sculpture by Bartolomeo Ammanati in the Bargello, Florence, and the painting after Michelangelo, ca 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 visual arts into the 19th century.

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, mother of Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra, the faithless wife of Agamemnon.

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*

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?

• '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.