The earliest close match is a 1904 Brussels lecture by André Gide, who illustrated it with Michelangelo, said to owe Moses’s compact, coiled pose to a flaw in the marble, and with Aeschylus, whose silent Prometheus came from a limit on how many actors could share the stage. The Leonardo attribution is probably a mix-up with his line on force: “La force naît par contrainte et meurt par liberté.” Stravinsky quoted that one in 1942.