Leda con i figli

Leonardo da Vinci spent years on a painting of Leda and the swan, and then it vanished, last recorded at Fontainebleau in the 1620s, split across warped panels, and gone by the 18th century. What survives of that lost composition is a handful of copies by his followers, and this is one of the finest. Giampietrino trained in Leonardo's Milan circle, and here he records Leda kneeling among the children who, in the myth, hatched from her eggs after Zeus came to her as a swan. He has left the swan out entirely. You still see the broken shells at her feet and the four babies, the twins Castor and Pollux with Helen and Clytemnestra, clambering around her, which is roughly how eyewitnesses once described Leonardo's own picture.