Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
File:Pieter Brueghel de Oude - De val van Icarus.jpg
Artist	probably not Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Year	c. 1554-55
Type	oil on canvas
Location	Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is a painting in oil on canvas long thought to be by Pieter Bruegel, although following technical examinations in 1996, that attribution is regarded as very doubtful.It is probably a version of a lost original by Bruegel, however. Largely derived from Ovid, the painting itself became the subject of a poem of the same name by William Carlos Williams, and is described in W. H. Auden's poem Musée des Beaux-Arts, named after the museum in which the painting is housed in Brussels.

In Ancient Greek mythology, Icarus succeeded in flying, with wings made of feathers secured with wax, but he flew too close to the sun, melting the wax, and fell into the sea and drowned. His legs can be seen in the water, just below the ship.

Though landscape paintings with the title subject represented by small figures in the distance were an established type in Early Netherlandish painting, pioneered by Joachim Patiner, to have a much larger unrelated "genre" figure in the foreground is original, and represents something of a blow against the emerging hierarchy of genres. Other landscapes by Bruegel, for example The Hunters in the Snow (1565) and others in that series of paintings showing the seasons, show genre figures in a raised foreground, but not so large relative to the size of the image, nor with a subject from a "higher" class of painting in the background.

The work was unknown until it was bought by the museum in 1912; subsequently another version, generally considered inferior, turned up, which is in another museum in Brussels (in this Icarus is still in the air). It is Bruegel's only painting of a mythological subject, and would be his only oil on canvas—his other works on canvas were in tempera. The perspective of the ship and figures is not entirely consistent, although this may enhance the power of the composition. He also produced a design for an engraving with the ship and the two falling figures.

The ploughman, shepherd and angler are mentioned in Ovid's account of the legend; they are: "astonished and think to see gods approaching them through the aether", which is not entirely the impression given in the painting. There is also a Flemish proverb (of the sort imaged in other works by Bruegel): "No plough stands still because a man dies". The painting may, as Auden's poem suggests, depict humankind's indifference to suffering by highlighting the ordinary events which continue to occur, despite the unobserved death of the mythic figure Icarus, who is seen drowning in the bottom right area of the sea. In Greek mythology, Icarus was the son of Daedalus, famous for his death by falling into the sea when he flew too close to the sun, melting the wax holding his artificial wings together. The sun, already half-set on the horizon, is a long way away; the flight did not reach anywhere near it.