After a lost painting of Leda and the Swan

Miniaturist painter Carl Gustav Klingstedt (1657-1734), Leda and the Swan, after Michelangelo


In his quest to acquire all things Italian, François I (1494-1547) always sought to attract the greatest lights of Italian painting—including Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea del Sarto, Michelangelo—to his court.

While he succeeded in convincing the aged Leonardo to enter his service in 1516 and, in so doing, obtained the Mona Lisa for France, the transalpine journey was a difficult and a dangerous one, and neither Andrea del Sarto nor Michelangelo could accept François’ invitation.

However a rare panel painting of Leda and the Swan created in 1530 by Michelangelo did make its way to France in the possession of Michelangelo’s pupil, Antonio Mini, who seems to have sold it to François I.

It entered the royal collection at Fontainebleau in the early 1530s. The painting Leda and the Swan by Michelangelo has since been lost...

The Flemish artist Cornelis Bos must have seen the work. This print, engraved and published by him, is the only record of Michelangelo’s completed painting.

 

Cornelis Bos, Leda and the Swan (1540s) after Michelangelo

Peter Paul Rubens would also have been familiar with Michelangelo’s Leda and he painted two versions of the subject.

You might notice that the twisting posture of Leda's body is very similar. Even the positioning of the fingers is mirrored. The swan is caressing the female in exactly the same way.

However the actual figure of the female varies drastically between Rubens’ style and Michelangelo’s style.

Michelangelo typically depicted women in a masculine way. Muscles are more clearly defined and the bodies look hard. The body is thinner. The hair is neatly styled. Michelangelo’s body proportions are a little skewed.

Rubens’ Leda's figure, on the other hand, is extremely curvaceous. The hair is somewhat loose and not as styled. The body proportions seem more realistic.

While Rubens’ two works are very similar, they do differ. 

Rubens' 1st Leda and the Swan (1601)

In the first depiction, the brushstrokes are looser, it is not as detailed, there is less landscape, no elaborate headpiece, the colors are muted and the drapes are green.

Rubens' 2nd Leda and the Swan (1602)

In the second painting, the brushstrokes are more precise, there is more detail, there is a clearer landscape in the background, an elaborate headpiece, more vibrant colors and the drapery is white and red.

Warm urban utopia

La ville transplantée

« Wandering, boats, horses. The ferryman who carries the message from one bank to another…»

« In Latin America there has been no revolution, only revolts. A form does not annihilate the next, it only adds to it. The past is not a burden against which we must always fight by dismissing it. So you see in my work a very loose reference to mythology, which leads to a more contemporary performance.»

– Alfredo Echazarreta

Living between France and Chili, the painter Alfredo Echazarreta was born in Santiago in 1945. Also printmaker and sculptor, he studied architecture and engraving.

 

Le choix de l'ange

Le dernier signal

Le don du jour 

Le rêve de Léda

Les attaches terrestres

Les envahisseurs

Nous pouvons tous voler

Rencontre fortuite

Séduction avec condor

Solaz

And I wonder who said that blue was a cold color…

God of the wild

God of nature, the wild, shepherds, flocks, goats, mountains... Pan is often associated with sexuality. God of the wild is a free spirit.

All Pan artworks © Yasemen Hussein

« My obsession with mythology began when I first saw a picture of Nijinsky dancing as Pan.»
–Yasemen Hussein

The Great God Pan (1860) by Frederic Leighton

See many Pan depictions here.

From the north

The Greek north wind God, strong and violent, is sometimes depicted by a woman, buffeted by the wind.

In ancient Greek religion and myth, the Anemoi were wind gods who were each ascribed a cardinal direction from which their respective winds came.

Notus was the south wind; Zephyrus, the west wind; Eurus, the east wind; Boreas, the north wind.

Boreas, 450 BC

Boreas is depicted as being very strong, with a violent temper to match. He was frequently shown as a winged old man with shaggy hair and beard, holding a conch shell and wearing a billowing cloak.

Boreas and his brother winds were often imagined as horse-shaped gods.

Boreas - oil painting by John William Waterhouse

The north wind god, in this remarkable painting (1902) by John William Waterhouse, is a woman, buffeted by the wind.

Study of Boreas - chalk on paper by John William Waterhouse

Boreas, the North Wind - recreated by Inglis

 I've found this digital reproduction by Inglis here: Robzentaur1′s blog, art, ego, acceptance and society

Here is the full painting with the background slightly altered, but retaining Waterhouse’s impressionist brushwork. The face is re-createded to make it stronger and more sensuous. Waterhouse’s original face is washed out and fragile looking. The oil paint is badly cracked. I reworked the upper areas of the shawl to create more of a feeling of flow and movement.

- Inglis

 ✴

Mt Boreas, in the western Olympus Range, Antartica, was named after the north wind god.

Leda and the Swan

Giovanni Rapiti

She was known as the Queen of Sparta, charmed by the Father of Gods and men disguised as a large water bird.

« Leda and the Swan is a story and subject in art from Greek mythology in which the god Zeus seduced, or raped, Leda in the form of a swan.

The subject undoubtedly owed its sixteenth-century popularity to the paradox that it was considered more acceptable to depict a woman in the act of copulation with a swan than with a man. The earliest depictions show the pair love-making with some explicitness—more so than in any depictions of a human pair made by artists of high quality in the same period.

The earliest known explicit Renaissance depiction is one of the many woodcut illustrations to Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a book published in Venice in 1499. This shows Leda and the Swan making love with gusto.»

More: Leda and the Swan at Wikipedia

[French School]

 Leon Reisener

Jacopo Pontormo

 Buonarroti Michelangelo

Emmanuel Benner

Bacchiacca

Giovanni Boldini

  Jerzy Hulewicz

 Joseph Stella

 [Lladro porcelain figurine]

 [attributed to] Luca Cambiasi

   Man Ray

Paolo Veronese

Leonardo da Vinci [detail]

François Edouard Picot

François Boucher

Michel Fingesten

Roger Grillon

Louis Jou

Paul Delvaux

Theodore Gericault

Paul Prosper Tillier

Marcel Bouraine

Leda and the Swan, poem by William Butler Yeats

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still            
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed            
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,            
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.             

How can those terrified vague fingers push            
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?            
And how can body, laid in that white rush,            
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?             

A shudder in the loins engenders there            
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower            
And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up,     
      
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,            
Did she put on his knowledge with his power            
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

 ➳

The following information may answer the question: their consummation resulted in 2 eggs from which hatched Helen (later known as the beautiful Helen of Troy), Clytemnestra, Castor, Pollux.