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.
(Yeats opted to witness a rape, made all the more mournful because of what it engendered: “the broken wall, the burning roof and tower and Agamemnon dead”. Not only the Trojan War lay ahead, but the fratricide involving Castor and Polydeuces — already at each other’s throats in Leonardo’s depiction — and Agamemnon’s murder by Clytemnestra.)
“The classical solution,” Beyst writes, “consists of staging the bodies immediately before their entwining. But such is not a becoming solution in the case of Leda and the swan: we precisely want to witness the proceedings after the encounter!”
Ultimately sublimated in colour, Henri Matisse’s version from about 1945.
For a while the swan’s head and long neck served as a handy penis (so to speak) with the wings articulating the scrotum. The different in size between a swan and a human was a problem, but eventually it was found that flapping wings could “express the superior strength of the swan. The task of subduing Leda’s body is then relegated to the beak which has to catch Leda in her nape.”
The artisans of ancient Greece kept the gossip about Leda and the Swan confined to the small scale — gem engravings and lamp decoration — but the Renaissance was primed to write the story large. At first it was pretty clear that bestiality was underway, but then it turned out to be a great way to depict sex on the sly: “It’s just a woman with her pet swan, Your Holiness!” Lorenzo de’ Medici, the cad, was of the “bring it on” persuasion and owned a Roman sarcophagus on which Leda reclined with her pet.
In 1504 Leonardo made the scene quite pleasant by comparison, with Leda seated among her children, but then four years later decided to steam it up with a naked Leda cuddling the swan in the presence of the just-hatched little ones.
“The interesting thing,” writes Beyst, “is that, in both versions, the beak no longer reaches to the navel, but to Leda’s very lips. It is no longer out at penetrating the vagina, let alone to catch Leda in her nape: its declared aim is bluntly Leda’s mouth. One of the formerly flapping wings now gently embraces Leda’s hip. And such entwining does hide nothing from view. On the contrary: since the encounter has shifted upwards, Leda can be taken under the arm from behind, to the effect that her magnificent front remains visible in all its splendour.”
Michelangelo painted a sex scene in 1529, though it, perhaps like Leonardo’s, met a cruel fate at the hands of the Christian Right wing of French royalty. Copies of copies persisted, however, and Cornelis de Bos, Bartolomeo Ammanati and the young Rubens were among those who based their efforts on the reproductions, with the swan stretched up tall against Leda.
Beyst again: “While da Vinci’s Leda rather modestly opposes the indecent proposals of the swan, Michelangelo’s willingly abandons herself. And that reminds us of the fact that Michelangelo’s swan is granted its natural proportions again. Which induces it not only to penetrate the mouth with its beak, but also the vagina with its penis: it suffices to get a glimpse on the position of the tail, which is spread like a fan over the vagina and the black web bluntly plopped down on the soft inner side of Leda’s white thighs. The red draperies whereon Leda is spread are the nearly concealed representation of a vagina.”
Correggio’s version, circa 1530, was owned by the French regent Philippe II, but young Louis XV slashed it up, evidently in a fit of moral shame.
The tale of Leda and the Swan was pretty much set to one side for two centuries until it was revived by the symbolists and expressionists — and Freud and the surrealists.
