Leda and her children playing with the swan, with a Roman temple in the background

Giovanni Battista Palumba

1500–1510 · Engraving · Drawings and Prints

According to Roman mythology, the god Jupiter transformed himself into a swan to seduce Leda, wife of a Spartan king, as she was bathing. She bore two eggs, from which two sets of twins were hatched—one of the babies was Helen of Troy. Palumba’s engraving was undoubtedly inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s ideas for a painting of Leda, preserved in two drawings now in Chatsworth (Derbyshire, United Kingdom) and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam). The ancient ruin of the Minerva Medica in Rome provides a splendid frame for the scene, as its form corresponds to the many curves of the composition and echoes that of the broken eggshell in the foreground.

Artist

Giovanni Battista Palumba

Date

1500–1510

Medium

Engraving

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1951