High Art and it's ongoing obsession and denial with bestiality rape. Part 1: The Actual Myth

Disclaimer: This post is NSFW, unless you work in a museum, gallery or maybe for one of those art magazines that cost $30 an issue; then it is a discourse on HIGH ART. Passers-by will compliment you on your exceptional taste, and a man in a tuxedo may offer you a flute of champagne from a silver tray. If any blue-collar plebian questions the appropriateness of your workplace reading choices, a swarm of wealthy matrons will appear in a poof of Clive Christian No. 1 and quack the word controversy at them. Except they'll pronounce it conTRAWHvuhsaay. This should scare away any salt-of-the-earth types.

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Part 1: The Actual Myth

Leda and the Swan: Zeus (as swan) rapes Leda (human girl).

He gon fuck you up.

Not really a full story, is it? Just a very typical Greek genealogical preamble for "heroic children to follow". In fact, here's the scene in its entirety from the Apollodorus:

[3.10.7] But Zeus in the form of a swan consorted with Leda, and on the same night Tyndareus cohabited with her; and she bore Pollux and Helen to Zeus, and Castor and Clytaemnestra to Tyndareus.
195 But some say that Helen was a daughter of Nemesis and Zeus; for that she, flying from the arms of Zeus, changed herself into a goose, but Zeus in his turn took the likeness of a swan and so enjoyed her; and as the fruit of their loves she laid an egg, and a certain shepherd found it in the groves and brought and gave it to Leda; and she put it in a chest and kept it; and when Helen was hatched in due time, Leda brought her up as her own daughter.

That's it. Two sentences in a four-book epic, (one of the sentences advocating an entirely different rape scene) buried between some family trees and a mention of the vendetta-style abduction-rapes of various women. And apparently, the hot swan-on-girl action was of less interest to the Greeks than the telegony involved in the quadruplets' conception. 

Ovid gives it two lines in a very very very long list of gods that turn into other things to rape women. Weirdly specific, Greece.

 And shew'd how Leda lay supinely press'd,
Whilst the soft snowy swan sate hov'ring o'er her breast,
-Metamorphasis, Book the Sixth

That's the myth in its entirety.

But if you turn your attention to the noncanonical stuff; holy shit. We've got poems for days, a couple of songs, and SO MUCH EROTIC FAN ART, YOU GUYS. I mean,- I thought I had a pretty good idea about the ratio of swan-rape to not swan-rape in art.

I had no idea. NONE.

Behold, the vast expanse of my ignorance.

This is one of the hot, wet darlings of the classical art world. To quote Wikipedia,

The subject undoubtedly owed its sixteenth-century popularity to the paradox that it was considered more acceptable to depict a woman in the act of copulation with a swan than with a man. 

Hoo boy. There's a lot to unpack in that one.

NOPE.

Part 2: The Fan Art