Leda and the Swan (Michelangelo)

Leda and the Swan was a tempera-on-canvas painting completed by Michelangelo in 1530 for Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, depicting the mythological union of Jupiter, in the form of a swan, with Leda, alongside an egg and the children Castor and Pollux. Alfonso dismissed the finished work as a little thing, so Michelangelo withheld it from him; the painting instead passed to France and the royal collection at Fontainebleau, where Queen Anne of Austria is said to have ordered its destruction in the seventeenth century because of its subject matter. The original does not survive, but painted copies in the National Gallery in London, the Gemaldegalerie in Dresden and Berlin, and the Correr Museum in Venice, along with prints and a copy and studies at the Casa Buonarroti, preserve its composition.