Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Nobody looks

The story is Ovid’s: Daedalus and his son Icarus escape from Crete on wings of feathers and wax, and Icarus flies too close to the sun. Here the fall is almost a footnote. A ploughman in a red shirt turns his furrow in the foreground, a shepherd with his flock gazes up at the sky, and an angler at the water’s edge minds his line — all three are in Ovid’s telling. Icarus is only a pair of pale legs kicking in the sea beside a ship in full sail, while the sun sits half sunk on the horizon.

Bruegel, or after Bruegel

The painting has long carried Bruegel’s name, but its attribution is disputed. It is now widely thought to be an early copy, by an unknown hand, of a lost original by Bruegel: the design is his, the painting probably not. A second version, in the Van Buuren Museum in Brussels, shows Daedalus in the sky; here the shepherd looks up at nothing. It was this picture that W. H. Auden saw in Brussels and wrote about in his 1938 poem “Musée des Beaux Arts”, on how suffering happens while ordinary life goes on.

Where it hangs

It belongs to the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, which acquired it in 1912, and measures 73.5 by 111 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 9,000-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 60 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels · Wikidata Q1247110 · Wikimedia Commons