On Leda’s pond
Paul Cézanne: “Leda with Swan”, from around 1881
Let’s go back to swanning Leda. She was, after all, was the mother of Helen of Troy, with whom we recently dallied (pun intended). More raunchy Greek mythology through the filter of the all-illuminating Catalan sunshine.
“Leda is lying between the swan’s wings,” wrote Ovid in “Metamorphoses”. He seemed to have no qualms about sex between consenting animals. But was Leda, wife of the Spartan king Tyndareus, a willing lover of the swan, who was in fact the supreme god Zeus in feathered form? Or was she the lusty old goat’s victim in another of the serial rapist’s assaults? Two juries have convened and two contradictory verdicts rendered.
Leda produced four eggs, from which hatched Castor, Clytemnestra, Polydeuces and the future Helen of Troy. The first pair may have been Zeus’ children, the latter her husband’s. (Helen is elsewhere the daughter of Nemesis, the goddess of disaster befalling the proud, but one suspects some wishful editing here.)
For the painters and sculptors of earlier times in particular, who lacked the psychological reference tools, portraying the story was no easy matter. By way of analysing WB Yeats’ 1928 poem on the subject, Belgian art lecturer Stefan Beyst offers an interesting physiological analysis of the way the human-avian coitus has been cast on his website. See the rest.
