Bronze sculpture of Leda and the Swan, France, after Etienne-Maurice Falconet

This scene is an unusual rendition of the mythological theme of Leda and the Swan, a story known from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (among other sources). It tells of the great affection that Jupiter (Zeus) held for beautiful young women, whom he was wont to woo in a variety of guises. To seduce Leda, he adopted the form of a swan and approached her by a riverbank. Leda subsequently laid two eggs, from which the twins Castor and Pollux were born.

From the fifth century B.C. onwards, the story of Leda and the Swan was a popular theme in Greek, Hellenistic and Roman art, especially sculpture. It was picked up once more during the Renaissance by artists including Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo: the former painted a standing Leda in 1510, while the latter painted her in recline in 1529-1530.

We usually see the theme embodied by two characters - Leda and the Swan. Falconet’s bronze with three figures - two women and the swan - is therefore a unique interpretation of the motif. This interpretation was based on a painting created in 1742 by François Boucher and exhibited in the same year at the Salon de l’Académie, where it was immediately purchased by Count Tessin for Queen Louisa Ulrika of Sweden. In Sweden, William Wynne Ryland (1732-1783) produced an engraving based on the painting, depicting a mirrored version of the scene.

Prints were distributed rapidly and on a massive scale throughout Europe, which is how this engraving found its way to France. In 1764, Falconet used Ryland’s print as a basis to create a model for biscuit porcelain for the Manufacture Royale de Porcelaine de France in Sèvres, in his capacity as head of the factory’s design workshop for porcelain statues since 1757.
Because a porcelain statue group with an open composition along the lines of Boucher’s example would be extremely vulnerable due to the appendages sticking out left and right, Falconet modified the group to form a more contained whole, with Leda caressing the Swan’s neck. However, he did keep the second female figure to avoid disrupting the attractive, balanced triangular composition. After 1764, the biscuit porcelain model was also cast in bronze.

Literature:
Alexandre Ananoff, François Boucher, dl. I, Parijs/Lausanne 1976
James Hall, Hall’s Iconografisch Handboek, vertaald door Theo Veenhof, Leiden 1993
Edmund Hildebrandt, Leben, Werke und Schriften des Bildhauers E.-M. Falconet 1716-1791, Strassburg 1908
George Levitine, The sculpture of Falconet, Greenwich/Connecticut 1972
Eric Moormann en Wilfried Uitterhoeve, Van Achilleus tot Zeus, De klassieke mythologie in de kunst, Nijmegen 1987, 1995
Pierre de Nolhac, Boucher, premier peintre du Roi, Parijs, 1925