Leda and the Swan is the Greek myth in which Zeus visits Leda, queen of Sparta, in the form of a swan, and the eggs laid after that night hatch Helen, the woman whose abduction starts the Trojan War. Painters have used it for desire, for the power of the gods and for the origin of a war. The picture to know is Correggio's Leda and the Swan in Berlin, painted about 1532, the only one of the great Renaissance Ledas that survives in the original.
The ancient sources say remarkably little. In Euripides' play Helen, of 412 BCE, Helen herself calls it only a story: "There is a story that Jupiter flew to my mother Leda in the shape of a swan." Painters were left to fill in the rest, and it is the pictures, more than any text, that carry the story forward.
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Three of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance gave the subject a panel or a canvas. Leonardo da Vinci finished his around 1508, Michelangelo his in 1530 for the Duke of Ferrara, and Correggio his about 1532 for the Duke of Mantua. Within about a quarter century, then, three of the greatest painters in Italy had each painted the same woman and the same bird.
Only one of them can be seen today. Leonardo's Leda dropped out of the French royal collection without a record of how it went, and Michelangelo's is said to have been burned for indecency. The museums that hold the copies name different culprits for that fire, and one of them states plainly that there is no evidence for it.
Correggio's Leda survived, but not whole. A later owner cut it up, and the head of Leda, the first thing anyone looks at, was restored by one hand after another, the last time in 1830. Whose face she wears in Berlin is a fair question, because the head has been repainted more than once.
What You'll Discover
What the ancient sources leave out.
What a visitor found in 1625.
Who gets blamed for the fire.
Whose face Leda wears in Berlin.
How the story outlived the paintings.