Correggio conceived a series of works entitled Amori di Giove or Love Affairs of Jupiter after the success of Venus and Cupid with a Satyr.

The precise order of the four works is still debated, though their main importance lies in their contribution to the development of secular and mythological painting via its new and extraordinary balance between naturalist rendering and poetic transfiguration.

[3] According to Vasari's Lives of the Artists,[4] the Leda and a Venus (i.e. Danaë) were commissioned by Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua as a gift for Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor.

However, one more recent study[5] suggests that all the paintings in the amori di Giove series were produced for the Sala di Ovidio (Ovid Room) in Mantua (meant for the duke's lover Isabella Boschetti) and only moved to Spain after Federico II's death in 1540, perhaps on the infante Philip's marriage to Maria Emanuela d'Aviz (1543).

It was confiscated by Napoleon and restored again by Pierre-Paul Prud'hon before being returned to Germany in 1814 and placed in the Berlin museums in 1830 – there Jakob Schlesinger painted a third replacement for Leda's head.