Leda mit dem Schwan

The version you can look at is a copy, because Michelangelo's original no longer exists. He painted it around 1530 for the Duke of Ferrara, then handed it instead to an assistant, who carried it to France and sold it into the royal collection at Fontainebleau. There the trail goes cold. The usual account is that a later French queen found the subject too lascivious and had the panel destroyed. What survives is a web of copies made while the original still hung in France, the best known of them once credited to the painter Rosso Fiorentino and now in London. They preserve the pose Michelangelo invented, Leda reclining with the swan, a composition he adapted straight from an ancient carved gem. It is one of the rare cases where we know a great painter's design intimately and have lost every trace of his actual hand on it.