It seems that humans have always wanted to fly like the birds, although it’s clear that few birds have ever wanted to walk far on two legs. As is often the case, our aspiration has been transformed into stories, among the oldest being that of Daedalus and his son Icarus. The father was artificer and master craftsman to King Minos of Crete. After creating the Labyrinth, in which the Minotaur was kept, father and son were effectively imprisoned on the island, and tried to escape by flying with wings constructed from feathers held together by wax.

Charles Landon’s Icarus and Daedalus (1799) shows the moment that Icarus launches in flight from the top of a tower, his arms held out and treading air with his legs during this first flight. Daedalus stands behind, his arms still held horizontally forward from launching Icarus.

The pair flew away successfully, but Icarus grew over-adventurous, flying too high and close to the sun, which melted the wax holding his wings together. He then plunged to his death in the Aegean Sea.

His fatal downfall is shown best in Jacob Gowy’s Fall of Icarus from 1635-7, a conclusion that should deter all but the most foolhardy from trying to fly. Later stories thus show humans flying on mythical beasts with wings, like the hippogriff in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.

Louis-Édouard Rioult’s Roger Rescues Angelica from 1824 shows the pair flying away after he had rescued her from the jaws of an orc, here left somewhere beneath them, as Ruggiero’s mission is successfully accomplished.

Even Cervantes’ Don Quixote, together with his long-suffering squire Sancho Panza, are duped into believing that they flew on a horse, as shown in Salvador Tusell’s illustration from about 1894, based on Gustave Doré’s fine series of prints.

As mythical flying beasts have ceased to be credible, the forces at work in human flight have grown darker.

In Goethe’s Faust it’s Mephistopheles himself who takes his victim into the air, as painted by Mikhail Vrubel in his Flight of Faust and Mephistopheles from 1896. Here Vrubel uses small and sometimes tiled patches of flat colour, outlined in black, to model the figures, similar to a style adopted by many of the artists who illustrate modern graphic novels.

If it’s not the Devil himself who does the flying, then it’s one of the many witches that serve as his acolytes.

Fritz Roeber’s Walpurgis Night Scene from ‘Faust’ from about 1910 shows this later scene, with Gretchen, Mephistopheles in red, and Faust surrounded by flying witches holding pitchforks.

Francisco Goya’s Witches’ Flight shows three witches levitating in the air while carrying a naked body, which they appear to be exorcising. Below them are a donkey and another two human figures, one shrouded in a white sheet to cover their eyes, the other lying on the ground covering their ears, a possible reference to Goya’s own deafness and tinnitus when he painted this in 1798.

The Age of Enlightenment brought a more physical and realistic approach to human flight, first using hot air balloons.

In the early eighteenth century, Europeans started experimenting with hot air balloons, and during the autumn of 1783 the Montgolfier brothers in France began to make the first human ascents using them. The British remained sceptical of the safety and merits of this French advance, and it took George Biggin’s Ascent in Lunardi’s Balloon to break the ice for them, an event painted here in 1785-88 by the wonderfully named Julius Caesar Ibbetson.

One of the more famous balloon flights made from Paris is shown in Jules Didier and Jacques Guiaud’s painting of the Departure of Gambetta in the Balloon ‘Armand-Barbès’ on 7 October 1870 (c 1870), during the Franco-Prussian War.

By the time the Prussians had encircled Paris, a delegation from the French government had been sent to Tours, leaving Léon Gambetta, Minister of the Interior, trapped in the city. He arranged to be flown from the foot of Montmartre in a balloon filled with coal-gas, escaping on 7 October 1870. His balloon, named Armand-Barbès, was one of over sixty being used to transport mail and carrier pigeons from and to Paris at the time, giving an idea as to how popular ballooning had become.

One of the few paintings of the following years showing ballooning is that of the Hungarian realist Pál Szinyei Merse, The Balloon from 1878.

Then in the summer of 1909, the Frenchman Louis Blériot became the first person to fly an aircraft across the Channel, from France to England.

H. Delaspre’s chromolithograph of The Channel Flight. Blériot, July 25th 1909 (1909) is one of the better prints produced at the time. The rest is aviation history.

In tomorrow’s article, I’ll consider divine flight.

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.