Leda

By the 1560s Florence was growing careful about bare flesh. The Council of Trent had closed in 1563 with a call to keep sacred images free of lasciviousness, and painters of mythology felt the pressure as well. In her story, Zeus took the form of a swan to seduce the queen of Sparta, and around 1530 Michelangelo had painted her lying in the bird's embrace, a picture now lost but widely copied. Here the scene shrinks to a single gesture. Leda turns her bare shoulder toward us, a rose mantle slipping off it and a jewelled cap in her curls, and the swan simply touches its beak to her face. The museum reads this restraint as the painter's own, since Vasari, his colleague and biographer, praised his modest ways. Its pendant, a Lucretia, hangs in the same room.