Leda and the Swan (Michelangelo)

• 1. Introduction

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  Leda and the Swan is a lost tempera on canvas painting by Michelangelo, produced in 1530. It no longer exists. What survives are copies and variants, secondhand echoes of a canvas that vanished from history. The composition showed Jupiter transformed into a swan, making love to a reclining Leda, a design drawn from ancient Roman gems and seals. An egg rested nearby, and Castor and Pollux appeared as children. This was Michelangelo's version of a Greek myth, and it did not survive. Who convinced Michelangelo to make it, and why did the deal take so long to close? And how does a painting disappear so completely that only copies remain to prove it ever existed?

• 2. A Promise on the Scaffolding

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  In 1512, Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, traveled to Rome to make peace with Pope Julius II. The pope had excommunicated him in the summer of 1510, after Alfonso allied with Louis XII of France against the Republic of Venice. Julius absolved him, and Alfonso stayed in Rome for a few days before heading back to Ferrara. On the 11th of July, he stopped at the Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo was still finishing the ceiling. Alfonso climbed the scaffolding himself and fell into a long, admiring conversation with the artist. Before the visit ended, Michelangelo promised the Duke a painting of his own. Several years passed without that promise turning into a formal commission.

• 3. Painted in Hiding

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  By 1529, Michelangelo had to travel to Ferrara for reasons that had nothing to do with painting. He was inspecting the city's walls as governor general of fortifications for the Florentine Republic, bracing for a feared Imperial siege. Alfonso used the visit to hold him to his old promise. According to the biographers Condivi and Vasari, Michelangelo produced the painting after returning to Florence in August 1530, once the city had fallen. He may have worked on it during the time he spent in hiding. The finished piece was a square composition in tempera. By mid-October 1530, the painting was finished. Alfonso, however, was not pleased with the result.

• 4. A Little Thing

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  Alfonso described the finished painting as a "little thing," and he said so within Michelangelo's hearing. Michelangelo refused to hand the work over. The painting and some of the preparatory drawings were later acquired, either bought or given, by Antonio Mini, who carried them to France in 1531. In 1532, Mini left the painting to Francis I of France, who sent it on to the Palace of Fontainebleau. The painting would not survive its time in the French royal collection.

• 5. An Act of Erasure

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  Queen Anne of Austria, according to reports, ordered the painting destroyed in the seventeenth century. She objected to what was later described in an inventory as its perceived "lasciviousness." That inventory, dated 1691, documents the act of erasure directly. It also lists a drawing by Michelangelo depicting Leda, a work marked for burning. The controversial nature of Michelangelo's rendition may have contributed to the disappearance of both the original painting and its cartoon. The drawing itself never appears in any inventory taken after 1691, suggesting it was destroyed, sold, or given away. What did survive were not Michelangelo's own materials, but the copies made from them before the original disappeared.

• 6. Survival Through Copies

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  Rosso Fiorentino once received credit for the best known surviving copy, which now hangs in the National Gallery in London. Other copies survive in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, and the Correr Museum in Venice. The Casa Buonarroti in Florence holds a copy of its own, along with a preparatory drawing of studies for Leda's head, believed to be Michelangelo's own work. Several printmakers also copied the composition. The most faithful of these prints is thought to be the one made by Nicolas Béatrizet, which includes Castor and Pollux alongside the central scene. Béatrizet's engraving remains one of the clearest surviving records of exactly how Michelangelo arranged the scene.