Leda and her children playing with the swan, with a Roman temple in the background

Leda and her children playing with the swan, with a Roman temple in the background

Giovanni Battista Palumba

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

According to Roman mythology, the god Jupiter transformed himself into a swan to seduce Leda, wife of a Spartan king, as she was bathing. She bore two eggs, from which two sets of twins were hatched—one of the babies was Helen of Troy. Palumba’s engraving was undoubtedly inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s ideas for a painting of Leda, preserved in two drawings now in Chatsworth (Derbyshire, United Kingdom) and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam). The ancient ruin of the Minerva Medica in Rome provides a splendid frame for the scene, as its form corresponds to the many curves of the composition and echoes that of the broken eggshell in the foreground.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Leda and her children playing with the swan, with a Roman temple in the backgroundLeda and her children playing with the swan, with a Roman temple in the backgroundLeda and her children playing with the swan, with a Roman temple in the backgroundLeda and her children playing with the swan, with a Roman temple in the backgroundLeda and her children playing with the swan, with a Roman temple in the background

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.