In art the swan starts as a disguise: in Greek myth Zeus turns into one to reach Leda, queen of Sparta, and the great painters of the Renaissance took the scene up. By the seventeenth century a Dutch painter had made the bird a fighter, and the picture to know is Jan Asselijn's The Threatened Swan, painted around 1650 and now in the Rijksmuseum.
In Asselijn's canvas a swan spreads its wings over her eggs and faces a dog that has crept up from the water. The canvas is 144 centimetres high and 171 wide, and it has mostly hung in the Rijksmuseum's Gallery of Honor.
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Most of what is said about this swan was added after Asselijn died in 1652. Technical analysis has shown that three inscriptions on the canvas are later than the painter: the Grand Pensionary, the office de Witt held, written between the swan's legs, Holland, on one of the eggs, and the enemy of the state, above the dog. All three are in Dutch.
With those words the swan becomes Johan de Witt, a leading politician of Holland, and the dog becomes his enemy. The Rijksmuseum calls this a later interpretation.
It also records that the Dutch state bought the painting on 11 June 1800 as the very first acquisition of its national gallery, the forerunner of the museum. A country began its collection with a swan that carried a political meaning its painter never gave it.
Long before it was a Dutch patriot, though, the swan had been a disguise, and the oldest disguise in art belongs to Zeus.
What happened to the great Renaissance paintings of Leda and the swan?
The oldest swans in this story are on walls…
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