レダと白鳥

Correggio painted this around 1530 as one of a set of mythological loves for a Renaissance court, showing Leda by a stream at three moments of her encounter with Jupiter, who has come to her as a swan. Its later history is where things turn strange. In 18th-century Paris the picture belonged to the Orléans family, and the duke's devout son Louis found it so indecent that he attacked it with a knife and destroyed Leda's face entirely. What you see now is not Correggio's head at all. It has been repainted more than once, first by a court painter, later by Prud'hon while the canvas was in Paris as Napoleonic loot, and reworked again after it reached Berlin around 1830. An early Spanish copy in the Prado hints at what was lost. In the original, Leda's head tilted further to the left and her expression was far more abandoned than the calmer face that survives today.