LedaANCIENT_Timotheos

LedaANCIENT_Timotheos

National Gallery inv. 1868
OGCMA s.v. "Leda"
Classical Sources:
Homer, Od. 11.298-304
Homeric Hymns to The Dioscuri, 17 and 33
Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis 46ff.
Euripides Helen 17-21, 214-57, 1149
Strabo Geog. 10.2.24
Apollodorus Libr. 1.7.10, 3.10.5-7
Hyginus Fab. 77
Pausanias, 3.1.4, 3.13.8, 3.161.

Timotheos, Leda and the Swan, Roman copy of a Greek original (370-360 BC); Prado, Madrid.

Timotheos is credited with the original of this famous sculpture, of which some twenty copies survive. Paintings and cameos from the First Century BC also preserve the pose: Leda holds her clothing up in her left hand — perhaps as a protection from the view of Tyndareus? or perhaps to shielding the swan from an eagle which is trying to snatch it? — while she holds the languid swan close with her right hand.

A classical marble statue of a partially draped woman holding a swan, looking up and to the right

The copy at the Capitoline Museum, Rome, inv. no. MC0302 (Albani Collection) features a swan with a much less lithe neck, though Leda's facial expression there seems even more distracted than here.

In the Middle Ages Leda, who conceived her child with Zeus, was seen as a type of Maria, whose conception was overseen by a dove. In Humanism and in the Renaissance, the mythological union with the divine became a metaphor of death. Moorman and Uiterhoeve see this as a possible reason for the resurgence of this motif in painting of the 16th Century, from Leonardo forward.

OGCMA slides are designed by Roger T. Macfarlane for use in Classical Civilization 241 courses at Brigham Young University.
The present resource contains information assembled for The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1400 – 1990’s, edited by J. Davidson Reid (Oxford 1994), and it is used with express permission from Oxford University Press.
Address concerns or inquiries to macfarlane@byu.edu.