Leda with Her Children

It is based on sketches for Leonardo's own Leda and the Swan, now in the collections of Windsor Castle, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, in Rotterdam, and Chatsworth House.

The result is a pair of twins, the beautiful Helen and the immortal Pollux as children of Zeus, Clytemnestra and the mortal Castor as offspring of Tyndareus.

William VIII, landgrave of Hesse-Kassel acquired the painting in 1756 at a Paris auction as a depiction of Caritas by Leonardo da Vinci, because one of the children and the eggshells were overpainted.

In 1940 it was acquired for 150.000 Reichsmark[3] by Gauleiter Erich Koch as a gift to Hermann Göring who already possessed a large art collection of nudes of the Gothic and Renaissance period in Carinhall.

After the end of the Second World War the Leda was brought to the Central Collecting Point in Munich and in 1962 reacquired by the Land Hesse.