The Borghesi sitting room Leda and the Swan

It is a cycle of thirteen panels, all originally painted on plaster and then torn and transported on different supports, first on canvas and then on hardboard. The cycle was painted by Giovan Battista Borghesi in 1812-1814 in his uncle Pietro Borghesi's house in Parma; the paintings were saved when it was decided to demolish the building in 1951, thanks to the interest of the historian Giovanni Copertini, and then bought by a collector. They returned to the antiques market in 1997, where they have been purchased by the Cariparma Foundation at a Finarte auction (Milan, 23 October 1997) and placed in such a way as to reconstruct the original room of the artist's uncle's house. The panels are all of mythological subject but not linked together. The cycle of the Borghesi house can be considered one of the artist's first independent tests and it allows us to know his first style that was strongly linked to neoclassical examples, French and Italian, but above all it was based on local 16th-century models and beyond: the reference is here to Parmigianino, that is clear in the figures of the monochrome nudes with serpentine shapes.

The panel represents Leda with the swan; its counterpart is the one that portrays Ganymede. The legend of Leda, the beautiful queen of Sparta and wife of Tindaro, tells that Zeus, who fell in love with Leda, turned into a swan to mate with her on the banks of the Eurota river exactly where the woman then laid an egg that hatched and let her children out, Helen and Pollux. In the same night she also laid with her husband Tindaro and from this sezual intercourse she became the mother of Castor and Clytemnestra. Leda is portrayed half-naked with a fluttering blue cloth, sitting on the clouds on a very bright gold background and accompanied by Jupiter in the form of a swan.