Word: leda
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Whether done as studies or for their own sake, all the drawings are strangely affecting. Leonardo's Leda-possibly a study for the painting that has been lost-has a sensual rhythm not often revealed by Leonardo. Rembrandt's landscapes and village scenes are masterful mixtures of meticulousness and freedom. Holbein could almost carve with his crayon, and Rubens, with his delicate and flowing line, could transform an act of drudgery into an act of grace. Somehow, the workings of genius are never more clear than in drawings of the quality of the collection at Chatsworth...
...their secrets, for almost nothing else told so much about how they built up their compositions or what sort of scene or gesture would catch their eye and cry out for immediate recording. But they were not only blueprints; they were often masterpieces in themselves. Leonardo's Leda (see opposite page) almost bursts out of her paper world; a landscape by Rembrandt sweeps up the eye, leads it to fill in details where the artist left only hints...
...tell their work apart. Though Lancret was never Watteau's equal, he mirrored the same pretty and fragile world that seemed to have nothing more on its mind than fun and leisure. In favoring mythology, the fashionable Jean François de Troy still kept the mood. His Leda could be any comely marquise languishing in her bath. Everything about the painting-its heavy lushness, its torpor, its sybaritic atmosphere-suggests an overripe society about to go rotten...
...asking anyone to pose ("The best I succeeded in doing was to persuade my sister-in-law to raise her skirt a little above the knee"), but the small sculpture pleased him. He decided to stick to sculpture from then on. In 1900 he turned out his delicate Leda, which was included in his first Paris show two years later. "In all modern sculpture," said Rodin of Leda, "I don't know of a piece that is as absolutely beautiful, as absolutely pure, as absolutely a masterpiece . . . What an artist...
...girl who danced like a dream-gay, relaxed, with beautiful legs. (But he was convinced that her eyes turned inwards and her dog's eyes outwards.) "I flirted with her a long time, and we were in love," he says impishly, and just as impishly he put Leda and the Swan in the background. "He did sort of make love to me under the canvas," says Adele. "He would look at me and purr. But I was madly in love with Prince George [later the Duke of Kent]. And I didn't have cross-eyes...