Leda was one of Leonardo's largest and most important panels

As usual it is hard to say how far these studies were made for their own sakes and how far they were preparatory to a picture. That they and others like them were used in a picture is certain. This was the lost picture of Leda and the swan which, as all the copies show, contained a profusion of flowers and grasses extraordinary even for Leonardo. Both the Anonimo and Lomazzo record that Leonardo painted a Leda which was taken to France in the sixteenth century. Cassiano del Pozzo who saw it in Fontainebleau in 1625 describes it in detail--"a standing figure of Leda almost entirely naked, with the swan at her feet and two eggs, from whose broken shells come forth four babies. This piece, though somewhat dry in style, is exquisitely finished, especially in the woman's breast; and for the rest the landscape and the plant life are rendered with the greatest diligence. Unfortunately, the picture is in a bad way because it is done on three long panels which have split apart and broken off a certain amount of paint". The picture is in inventories of Fontainebleau of 1692 and 1694, but does not appear in them again, and Carlo Goldoni, visiting Versailles in 1775, can find no trace or memory of it. He adds that it is not in the list of pictures destroyed, as he says, per decisione d'una divozion malintesa, so the tradition that it was burnt by the orders of Madame de Maintenon because of its indecency is probably without foundation.

Cassiano del Pozzo's description shows that the Leda was one of Leonardo's largest and most important panels and it is worth making some effort to reconstruct it correctly. Our materials for doing so are relatively abundant. In the first place, we have Leonardo's own drawings of the head and bust; then a pen drawing by Raphael evidently copying Leonardo's cartoon which shows the whole figure and the babies; a red chalk drawing in the Louvre by a close pupil of Leonardo and numerous painted versions by pupils and contemporaries.

We can divide these copies into two distinct groups. The first, which is represented by Raphael's drawing, the Louvre drawing, a picture by Bugiardini in the Borghese and a copy formerly in the Collection of M. Richeton, shows Leda with her body so far twisted round that her left breast is in profile and the line of her right arm comes almost down to her hip. She seems to be straining away from the swan's bill. The children are not disposed regularly as in the other group of copies, though the Raphael drawing and the Richeton version contain a baby in roughly the same attitude. Since Raphael's drawing belongs to his Florentine period, this version of the Leda must have been completed before 1504. We may infer that it was no more than a cartoon or large drawing in which the position of the children was only suggested. The other group of copies must derive from Leonardo's picture. All of these are by Milanese and not Florentine artists, and suggest that the original was painted after Leonardo's return to Milan. He evidently felt that the twist of Leda's body in the cartoon had been too violent for a finished painting and modified it considerably. As a result, the dramatic intention of her shrinking movement is lost, and the pose becomes artificial. He also decided on the position of the children, which is the same in all the copies of the painting. Of these the closest to Leonardo is that at Wilton which is almost certainly the work of Cesare da Sesto, and so may have been painted in Leonardo's workshop between 1507 and 1510. Cesare has made alterations in the landscape, which is characteristic of his style, but Leda's elaborate coiffure is line for line the same as one of Leonardo's drawings at Windsor, No. 12,516. Less close, but still deriving directly from Leonardo's painting, is the ex-Spiridon version which was once claimed as the original. Other versions drift further and further from the original, only the pose of the figure remaining the same.

Even in her final modified form the Leda remains an extreme example of Leonardo's love of twisting forms. As in Indian sculpture, the high full breasts are made the centre of a sequence of curves moving freely in space, and contrasted with the open, frontal axis of the hips. This contrast has its own meaning, but it is interesting to note that Leonardo at an early stage attempted a design even more expressive of his love of contraposto. This experiment is best seen in a beautiful sketch at Windsor, which is on the same sheet as a study for Anghiari. Leda is kneeling on her right knee, her left cutting across her body in a counter rhythm to the movement of her shoulders. Two pen and ink drawings at Weimar and Chatsworth show how swan and grasses charged the whole composition with a more than Indian complexity. Nowhere else does Leonardo give such free rein to his strangely unclassical rhythmic sense.