A Failed College Essay about Icarus

There is a painting and a related poem that have significantly shaped my perspective of life, my values, and my purpose. The painting in particular, has made me more attuned to suffering and less indifferent to the plights of others. The subject of my essay is centered on Pieter Brueghel’s 1558 oil on canvass Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c 1558 Oil on canvas, mounted on wood, 73.5 x 112 cm.) In addition, this essay explores some origins, controversies and a well known poem about the painting.

In the lower right of Brueghel’s springtime picture, Icarus has splashed down into the water with legs thrashing. All else in the landscape turns away. The wind is pushing the ship’s sail in the opposite direction. The plowman and horse, the shepherd, the setting sun, and the shining port city all shift the audience’s eye from the tragedy. I did not even notice the drowning boy on my first glance of the painting. The one exception is the angler, also in lower left, whose head is focussed downward, as if pulling in a fishing net.

In my perspective, the angler is one of the more intriguing characters in the landscape. His arm is reaching out toward Icarus, but appears only to be pulling something else out of the water. A person so near who could potentially save this drowning boundary pushing, mortal youth . It is this individual who captures the human disposition to ignore other’s sufferings more intensely, in my view, than any other element in the scene. It is conceivable, that his peripheral vision is at the nearest degree of seeing the tragedy. Yet the angler’s focus is on his own necessity and the other figures are clearly looking away.

Brueghel’s work is based on Book VIII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Story of Daedalus and Icarcus. In Ovid’s account, the ploughman, the angler, the mountain shepherd, “stare, and view ’em with religious eyes, And strait conclude ’em Gods; since none, but they, Thro’ their own azure skies cou’d find a way.” Brueghel’s representation, creates a different interpretation to support the premise of human passivity.

One of the more recognized poems about this painting was authored by W.H. Auden. For the last 20 years, I was under the impression his 1940 poem Musée des Beaux Arts was about Pieter Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. A few months ago, I found that my impression was wrong. Harper’s Magazine clarifies in an article from November, 2008. “The bulk of the poem is clearly about a different painting, in fact it’s the museum’s prize possession: ‘The Census at Bethlehem.'”

Although, the last stanza of Auden’s poem does substantiate how the “Old Masters” were never wrong about suffering by referring to Brueghel’s Icarus.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

From a JSTOR article, Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus: Ovid or Solomon by Lyckle de Vries the authenticity of Brueghel’s Icarus is called into question. The painting in the Musées des Beaux-Arts is arguable as “its authenticity was more or less ruled out by technical examination” and its “condition is not perfect.” In addition, the article refers to a second version of the painting, held in a separate museum. The authenticity of the second version is not questioned. These examinations would undeniably be critical to a collector of art. Although, the theme created by Brueghel is what has guided me for years.

I began this essay considering many powerful personal interactions with art. I once sat for three hours on the second floor of the the east wing of The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. entranced Alexander Calder’s Untitled mobile in the atrium. I have written several essays in my undergraduate years during the 1990’s on works of Edvard Munch, David Siqueiros, and Wassily Kandinsky. What sets Brueghel’s Icarus apart from other works of art is that it has provided me a conceptual framework for living, a framework for connecting with my human environment.

{Footnote. 1/5/13 I think the real reason that I didn’t get considered into Grad AH Program, was that I forgot to sumbit transcript from Northern Michigan U (from 0.5 semester in U.P. 1988 yo!).  Today, I am not looking at this as a failure, just a path that I didn’t really want to aggressively pursue}