Leda and the Swan is a story and subject in art from Greek mythology in which the god Zeus, in the form of a swan, seduces, or rapes, Leda. According to later Greek mythology, Leda bore Helen and Polydeuces, children of Zeus, while at the same time bearing Castor and Clytemnestra, children of her husband Tyndareus, the King of Sparta. In the W.B. Yeats version, it is subtly suggested that Clytemnestra, although being the daughter of Tyndareus, has somehow been traumatized by what the swan has done to her mother. According to many versions of the story, Zeus took the form of a swan and raped or seduced Leda on the same night she slept with her husband King Tyndareus. In some versions, she laid two eggs from which the children hatched.In other versions, Helen is a daughter of Nemesis, the goddess who personified the disaster that awaited those suffering from the pride of Hubris.
Greco-roman mosaic
Giovanni Battista
(atributed to) Leonardo da Vinci
Raphael
Virgil Solis
Cesare da Sesto
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Ridolfo Ghirlandaio
Paolo Veronese
Peter Paul Rubens
François-Edouard Picot
Théodore Géricault
Giovanni Boldini
Paul Cézanne
Gustav Klimt
Henri Matisse
Cy Twombly
Jerzy Hulewicz
François Boucher
Gustave Moreau
Salvador Dalí
Jacopo Robusti (Tintoretto)
Arturo Michelena
Fernando Botero
Constantin Brâncuși
Frederic Leighton
Warwick Globe
Louis Icart
Sam Taylor Wood
Helmut Newton
Joel Peter Witkin
Kate Moss photographed by Steve Klein
Derrick Santini
The Genealogy of Style 