If you find geese daunting, then what about swans? Although usually seen as graceful if not regal, fully grown adults can weight over 15 kg (33 pounds), and can put up a real fight. They feature in one well-known myth that must have seemed incredible even to the ancients, that of Leda and the swan.

Leda, wife of Tyndareus, King of Sparta, was impregnated by Zeus in the form of a swan, at about the same time that she was also impregnated by her husband. Her twin pregnancies thus resulted in two eggs: one hatched into Castor, who was human because his father was Tyndareus; the other hatched into Polydeuces (Latin Pollux), who was divine as his father was Zeus, and the twins were known as the Dioskuroi.

This interpreted copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Leda and the Swan, probably painted in the early 1500s and now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, summarises a later account involving Helen’s unique birth, with two eggs and a fourth baby, Clytemnestra. Later paintings, perhaps wisely, concentrated on Leda and Zeus, and skipped the incredible egg phase altogether.

Tintoretto and his workshop painted Leda and the Swan in about 1578-83, and wittily include two caged birds, a duck and what appears to be a parrot, with a cat taunting the duck.

Gustave Moreau started his early Leda in 1865 but abandoned it incomplete in 1875.

Moreau’s later watercolour of Leda and the Swan (c 1882) revisits this myth as another static display of female beauty, with the added twist of a large, dark aquiline bird by Leda’s feet. Although this could be an eagle, the bright red at its base suggests the flames of a phoenix just starting to self-combust. This is a curious combination of symbols of self-renewal through cyclical combustion, and a woman who laid eggs.

Joseph Stella’s Leda and the Swan (1922) follows a more modern tradition.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Leda and the Swan is drawn not from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but direct from older Greek mythology. He shows over twenty young children, some of them winged amorini, bringing the swan to Leda as she wades into a river.

Swans appear in the supporting cast of some other myths.

After the scorched remains of Phaëthon were buried by Naiads in a distant tomb, his mother Clymene was left to mourn his death. Phaëthon’s lamenting sisters were then transformed into poplar trees, and their tears into amber (electrum). Phaëthon’s beloved friend Cycnus was transformed into a swan who shuns the heat by taking to the water that extinguishes fire. His name lives on in the genus to which swans belong, Cygnus.

Santi di Tito’s fresco of The Sisters of Phaethon Transformed into Poplars, from about 1570, shows the four young women with leaves sprouting from their hands and heads, as they lament the death of their brother. A swan makes a cameo appearance in the foreground, referring to the transformation of Cycnus.

The chariot of Venus is sometimes described as being drawn by white swans, as shown in Antoine Coypel’s painting of The Alliance of Bacchus and Cupid from about 1702, below.

Swans have also made the occasional transfer into modern legend, including that of King Arthur.

N. C. Wyeth’s illustration from 1922 accompanies the text “And when they came to the sword that the hand held, King Arthur took it up.” As three swans fly low behind them, Arthur and Merlin approach the hand in the lake that is presenting Arthur with his sword.

Other mythical themes have been attended by swans.

The association between Pegasus and the Muses was revived in one of Gustave Moreau’s ‘new’ history paintings, of Hesiod and the Muses in 1860. This is the first of a series of works showing Hesiod, generally considered to be the first written poet in the Western tradition to exist as a real person. He is shown to the left of centre, as a young man holding a laurel staff in his right hand. The Muses are squeezed in together, and one is on her knee to present Hesiod with a laurel wreath. There are four swans on the ground, and one in flight above Hesiod, a winged Cupid sat on the left wing of Pegasus, and a brilliant white star directly above the winged horse.

In 1896, Mikhail Vrubel met the operatic soprano Nadezhda Zabela, and they married shortly afterwards. His patron invited her to perform in his theatre, and in 1900 she sang in the role of Tsarevna Swan-Bird, or The Swan Princess (1900), in the world première of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Tale of Tsar Saltan, based on the poem of the same name by Pushkin.

Unfortunately, swans have also been consumed by royalty and nobles, in the infamous dish Swan Pie.

Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Taste (or Allegory of Taste) (1618), with figures painted by Rubens, is an extensive catalogue of what was then considered to be edible, including a well-prepared swan.

Frans Wouters’ Allegory of Taste was painted in 1635–59, and clearly inspired by Brueghel’s painting. Instead of the lavish jam-packed collation in that earlier work, Wouters seems to have had a smaller budget, or perhaps wished to avoid the sin of gluttony. There is still the infamous Swan Pie on the table.

There are even a few paintings where swans are just swans, including this wonderfully painterly watercolour by Marià Fortuny.

His Masquerade (1868) shows an open-air masked ball, presumably held in Italy in the autumn, which is arousing the interest or bemusement of two swans. Dress is liberal to say the least, with the woman in the centre baring her breasts while holding a parasol, but she has none of the grace of those swans.

Painters can be intrepid, carrying their pochade box up mountains, deep into caves, across deserts, and in boats, but there’s one place that very few have painted, underwater. Breath-hold diving for food, pearls and coral is an ancient pursuit, but not one conducive to even making lightning sketches. Diving bells don’t seem to have appealed to major artists, and it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that any attempted to depict people underwater, initially in painting the story of Ophelia’s drowning, from William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.

It was Eugène Delacroix who first seems to have realised the visual potential in Ophelia’s drowning. His first painting of The Death of Ophelia in 1838 follows Queen Gertrude’s account of events, with Ophelia climbing into a willow tree whose branch breaks, dropping her into the stream below. Delacroix shows her body already partially submerged.

Fifteen years later, in 1853, Delacroix returned to the story and painted The Death of Ophelia again, just as loosely but with richer chroma. Although the artist has reversed the image here, she is still holding onto the branch of a tree, with her left side submerged.

One of the best-known Pre-Raphaelite paintings is John Everett Millais’ Ophelia, painted between 1851-2, in which Ophelia drowns herself in the “weeping brook”. Its background was painted en plein air near Ewell, Surrey, England, during 1851, after which the figure of Ophelia was painted in over the following winter, using as the model Lizzie Siddal in a bathtub full of water.

This is the first depiction to ignore Queen Gertrude’s account in favour of a more tragic-romantic self-drowning. There is a deeper and more poignant tragedy here too, in that Lizzie Siddal, Millais’ long-suffering model for this work, died just a decade later at the age of only 32, from an opium overdose that may well have been suicidal in intent.

It took until about 1894 for Paul Albert Steck to depict Ophelia fully submerged. In common with images of the drowned woman, there is a profound calm, a grace in the streamlines of the weeds, her dress and hair, and a dreadful finality in the last bubbles of air rising to the surface.

By that time, other paintings of drowning women had appeared.

Paul Delaroche’s moving painting of The Young Martyr (1853) shows a young Christian woman whose hands were bound before she was thrown into the River Tiber in Rome, during the reign of the emperor Diocletian (284-305 CE). The writer and critic Théophile Gautier considered her a “Christian Ophelia”, and a paragon of divine beauty.

The other famous drowned woman was the poet Sappho, who is reputed to have thrown herself into the sea from the Leucadian cliffs due to her unrequited love.

Ary Renan painted Sappho at least twice. The first from 1893 shows her reclining amid a fantastic and deep layer of underwater vegetation, her lyre some distance from her head, at the right edge.

The twentieth century brought more diverse underwater views.

Joaquín Sorolla’s The White Boat, Jávea, combines broken reflections with underwater views, and was painted during his summer campaign on the coast to the south of Valencia in 1905.

After the First World War, Joseph Stella painted a series of mythical narratives, including The Birth of Venus in 1922. As might be expected, his treatment is completely novel and seems to have benefited from visits to an aquarium. Aphrodite is shown at sea, in the upper part of the painting her upper body above the waterline, and below morphing into an aquatic plant below that, where it finally merges into a helical rather than clam shell.