Landscape with the Fall of Icarus1 – (Pieter Bruegel The Elder) Previous Next


Artist:

Style: Renaissance

Topic: Landscape

Technique: Oil

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is a painting in oil on canvas (73.5 cm × 112 cm) 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, probably from the 1560s or soon after. It is in oils whereas Bruegel's other paintings on canvas are in tempera. Based on the mythological scenario by 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 Greek mythology, Icarus succeeded in flying, with wings made by his father Daedalus, using feathers secured with wax. Ignoring his father's warnings, Icarus chose to fly 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. The sun, already half-set on the horizon, is a long way away; the flight did not reach anywhere near it.

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