The eye is drawn instead to the glittering cities and smart ships in the distance. You might miss him entirely, without the title to alert you. You have to peer very closely to see the drowning man. Icarus’s end is deliberately not the central focus of the painting. Daedalus had warned his son not to fly too close to the sun in case its heat were to melt the structure, but the impetuous boy soared too high anyway and, in the painting, has just tumbled down into the waves, to his death.
Together with his father Daedalus, the young man had made himself a pair of wings, glued together with wax. Reckless Icarus, the legendary figure from Classical mythology, is in the final stages of one of the ancient world’s most famous aeronautical disasters. It shows a superficially bucolic scene: ships are taking sail, a shepherd is tending to his flock, distant cities look prosperous and ordered.īut in the bottom right hand corner of the canvas, a tragedy is unfolding, all but unheeded. Both of these works of art are powerfully enlightening about the way the artists saw humanity.Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is a large painting from the 1560s that hangs in Belgium’s largest museum, the Musée des Beaux Arts – and is held to be a meticulous copy of an original (now lost) work by the Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder. In Williams’ poem it’s because he spends more time describing the setting than discussing the fall. In Brueghel’s case it’s because he’s drawn his viewers’ eyes away from the fall. Still, when WCW does return back to the tragedy at hand he does so in a roundabout way, mentioning wings, wax, and insignificance before the last line where it is finally noted upon that Icarus was drowning to death with “a splash quite unnoticed.”īoth artists have skillfully managed to depict a very horrific moment in Greek mythology as a casual occurrence through understatement. The reader is sort of pulled through this beautiful sounding scenery that almost makes one forget that they’re reading about a tragedy, which is the same effect that Brueghel’s painting has on his viewers. Then, WCW goes on to talk about the forefront of the scenery for three stanzas before he returns to Icarus: In the beginning of Williams’ poem he tells his readers what he is addressing, “According to Brueghel/ when Icarus fell/ it was spring,” but even in that statement the emphasis is not on Icarus, it’s on the fact that it was spring His poem, also titled “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” dwells in the world of understatement that Williams is so good at depicting. Williams Carlos Williams was the perfect poet to pay homage to this painting. This technique is to highlight humanity’s disinterest in the misfortune of others. In the painting, the viewpoint is from a far, but above so that the viewers eyes are drawn to linger on the farmers or note the weather and landscape long before they notice the pair of flailing legs in the bottom corner.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Brueghel is a painting that portrays the Greek mythological character Icarus during his last moments after flying too close to the sun and having his wax wings melt, consequently causing him to plummet to the sea and drown.
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