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| Anonymous French Artist Abduction of Europa ca. 1650-1700 oil on canvas Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Narbonne |
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| Hendrik van Balen Abduction of Europa ca. 1610 oil on panel Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna |
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| Hendrik Goltzius Jupiter and Europa ca. 1590 drawing Städel Museum, Frankfurt |
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| Bernardino Luini Europa and Companions picking Flowers ca. 1520-22 drawing (study for fresco) Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
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| Antonio Canova Venus and Adonis 1795 marble Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Marcantonio Franceschini Venus discovering the Dead Adonis ca. 1695 drawing Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna |
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| Pietro Bianchi Apollo and Daphne before 1740 oil on canvas Musée Calvet, Avignon |
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| Johann August Nahl the Younger Cupid and Psyche before 1825 drawing Kupferstichkabinett- Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden |
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| Jacob Jordaens Cupid and Psyche ca. 1643-47 oil on canvas Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp |
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| Nicolas Bertin Psyche abandoned by Cupid ca. 1720 oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Arts de Carcassonne |
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| Nicoletto da Modena Leda and the Swan ca. 1500-1510 engraving Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| James Pradier Leda and the Swan 1851 ivory and bronze with gold, silver and turquoises Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Johann Rudolf Schellenburg Portrait of artist Jacques-Antoine Arlaud (vignette of Leda and the Swan) ca. 1769 drawing (print study for book illustration) Graphische Sammlung, Zentralbibliothek Zürich |
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| Salomon Gessner Leda and the Swan ca. 1802-1803 etching Graphische Sammlung, Zentralbibliothek Zürich |
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| Giulio Bonasone Leda and the Swan (series, Loves of the Gods) ca. 1545 engraving Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden |
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| Virgil Solis Leda and the Swan ca. 1550 drawing Kupferstichkabinett, Kunstmuseum Basel |
The Medieval distinction between universals and particulars was mainly a matter of logic. In these terms, Leonardo had discovered a law about the biological class called "trees" to which every individual tree belonged. Those who wanted to portray a tree in their garden had first to know about the structure and proportion of trees. But thanks in part to the influence of Platonism, the whole distinction could be given a different twist. For Plato, the universal is the idea, the perfect pattern of the tree exists somewhere in a place beyond the heavens, or, to use the technical term, in the intelligible world. Individual trees or horses or men, such as the painter may encounter in real life, are only imperfect copies of these eternal patterns, imperfect because base matter will always resist the flawless seal and prevent the idea from realizing itself. It was on these grounds that Plato himself denied art its validity, for what value can there be in copying an imperfect copy of the idea? But on the same grounds, Neoplatonists tried to assign to art a new place that was eagerly seized upon by the emerging academies. It is just the point, they argued, that the painter, unlike ordinary mortals, is a person endowed with the divine gift of perceiving, not the imperfect and shifting world of individuals, but the eternal patterns themselves. He must purify the world of matter, erase its flaws, and approximate it to the idea. He is aided in this by the knowledge of the laws of beauty, which are those of harmonious, simple geometrical relationships, and by the study of those antiques that already represent reality "idealized," i.e., approximated to the Platonic ideal.
I believe this doctrine, which held sway in the academies for at least three hundred years, from 1550 to 1850, rests on self-deception. It endows the art of drawing, not a particular tree, but a tree, not a particular man, but a man . . . with a slightly specious philosophical halo. Mere portrayal is menial and low. You must recreate nature. If the tree or the man in front of you does not conform to that geometrical scaffolding now presented as the perfect canon, so much the worse for the tree or the man. The perfect painter is endowed with the gift of seeing the universal in the particular, of looking across the dross of matter at the "essential form" which –in Aristotelian rather than in Platonic terms – shaped the resisting clay from within.
We need not doubt that painters experienced this very thrill. And yet one suspects that the pattern they found behind the visible world was not the one laid up in heaven but the remembered shapes they had learned in their youth. Would not a Chinese call that orchid "perfect" which corresponds most closely to the rules he had absorbed? Do we not tend to judge human bodies by their resemblance to those Greek statues that have become traditionally identified with the canon of beauty?
– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960)