Leda and the Swan
Leda and the Swan is a story from Greek mythology in which Zeus rapes or seduces Leda in the guise of a swan.
Leda and the Swan, a 16th-century copy after a lost painting by Michelangelo, National Gallery, London
From Ovid’s brief account in the Metamorphosis the story became a well-known myth throughout the Middle Ages, and emerged more prominently in the Italian Renaissance as a classical theme with deeply erotic overtones. The subject owed its popularity due to the peculiar idea that at the time, it was considered more acceptable to depict a woman in the act of copulation with a swan than with a man.
Less popular in the 18th and early 19th centuries, although painted at least twice by Francois Boucher, Leda and the Swan again became a popular motif in the later 19th century onwards, with many Symbolist and Expressionist treatments.
Leda and the Swan, Francois Boucher, 1740, Private collection
Art & artists hold a mirror to society.
Leda and the Swan, Cy Twombly, Rome 1962, The Museum of Modern Art
Hugely evocative of the violence of the act is Cy Twombly’s abstract version of Leda and the Swan which sold for $52.9 million at Christie’s in 2017.
Kara Walker’s powerful silkscreen print, The Emancipation Approximation [Scene 2] speaks to the tragic history of rape perpetuated on female slaves by their masters and addresses the legacy of antebellum miscegenation.
The Emancipation Approximation [Scene 2], Kara Walker, 1999-2000, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Gift of Michael Jenkins and Javier Romero
What are we enabling as a society?
Consider the facial expression of the woman in Botero’s sculpture.
Leda and the Swan, Fernando Botero, 1996, outside the Peninsula Hotel, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Tarquin and Lucretia, Tintoretto, 1578-80, Art Institute Chicago
To me, her face has the same blank expression as Lucretia in Tintoretto’s painting Tarquin and Lucretia.
I was in my studio studying this work in pastels when I noticed that expression . . . and that stopped me cold.
Suddenly I recalled asking my doctor why I hadn’t fought back.
“Most don’t”, she replied and turned away.
I then realized how terrible I had been feeling as I was working on my study of this work. I realized I couldn’t continue.
If energy goes where attention is directed, why feed into more of the same?
I knew immediately that I had to find a new way to address the situation.
I decided to start a new encaustic painting series that looked at women in an entirely different way. Rather than re-telling or reinterpreting the myths, scriptures, stories and artworks of the old masters I realized I needed to change the game entirely.
I decided to paint just their faces; recognizable yet abstracted, painted closeup so we can look into their eyes without distractions. We’re not thinking about their body shape or size, the hairstyle or the clothes. We’re looking into the eyes and seeing the soul, the mind.
In avoiding the things and situations typically used to objectify women and focusing entirely on their faces, I aim to show what remarkable people they are. Instead of presenting women as victims, I celebrate women as survivors, wise and willful, brave, insightful, patient, determined, strong, fierce, impulsive, compassionate and kind. I choose to focus on contemporary women so that we could become more aware of the amazing women shaping our world today.
This is what inspired my project Eyeing Medusa.
how do representations of women being raped colour our attitudes today?
Women today struggle against the assumption that they are asking for it when they are raped.
Women are expected to modify their behaviour, change the way they dress and do whatever they can to avoid being raped.
Men are yet to be taught not to rape.
In many countries, such as in the United States of America, women are forced to carry the pregnancies resulting from a rape.
During WWII, the Japanese forced an estimated 200,000 women into sex slavery. Considered prostitutes, they are more prosaically known as the “comfort women”. Girls as young as fourteen were forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers from morning to night. Korean sex slave survivor Kim Bok-dong endured this torture for eight years. The Japanese government has yet to apologize for these atrocities.
Tarana Burke, an African-American civil rights activist from The Bronx, New York, started the #MeToo movement: a global phenomenon that raised awareness about sexual harassment, abuse, and assault in society.
Yazidi Human Rights Activist, Nadia Murad was kidnapped by ISIS, imprisoned, raped and tortured repeatedly. Upon her escape she founded Nadia’s Initiative, an organization dedicated to helping victims heal; and to ending the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.
leda and the swan — through the years
Consider William Butler Yeats’ poem
Leda and the Swan.
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Think about the assumptions and implications of that poem and the plethora of artworks preceding and following.
It’s time to stop romanticizing and normalizing rape.
It’s time for men to learn not to rape.
rape in art
References
- New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, Hamlyn Publishing Group Ltd., New York, 1959
- Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood, Merlin Stone, Beacon Press, Boston, 1984
- When God Was A Woman, Merlin Stone, Harvest Edition, 1976
- The Civilization of the Goddess, The World of Old Europe, Marija Gimbutas, HarperCollins Publishers, 1991
- The Language of the Goddess, Marija Gimbutas, HarperRow publishers, San Francisco, 1989
- https://jsma.uoregon.edu/sites/jsma2.uoregon.edu/files/Emancipation%20Approx.pdf