Abstract: This article takes the ancient remark by E. Wind, who conjectured that Baudelaire, evoking Michelangelo’s sculpture, The Night, in his sonnet The Ideal, was also thinking of another work by the artist, Leda and the Swan, as its starting point. This assumption allows us to see the correspondences between these two melancholic artistes, both inclined to the inversio. Between Leda’s ecstasy and The Night’s lethargy can come the motif of the swan, so rich in symbolic values.
