'De Val Van Icarus' ('Landscape with the Fall of Icarus')
[Click image to see larger version]
Pieter Brueghel the Elder (for original composition: this surviving painting is likely an early copy by an artist unknown1)
De Val Van Icarus ('The Fall of Icarus'), c. 1555-1558
Oil on canvas mounted on wood, w112 cm x h73.5 cm (44.1" x 28.9")
Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium
Link to slideshow explanation with zoom-ins: Google Cultural Institute
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Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus, actually super-condensed this time I promise: Daedalus is a genius inventor who builds a fancy minotaur labyrinth (that one) for an island king, but the king imprisons him in a tower, because reasons. Daedalus creates wings for himself and his son Icarus to escape, and warns Icarus not to fly too close to the sun or it'll melt the wax keeping the wings together, but Icarus does, falls into the ocean, and drowns. (There's also some unrelated backstory about Daedalus have a nephew or something, whom Daedalus suspects might be smarter than him, so he pushes him out a tall window, and the goddess Athena catches the boy and turns him into the first-ever partridge, and that bird is now scared of heights and lays its eggs in hedges. Moral being, don't leave your kids with Daedalus.)
So FYI, there's a ton going on with this painting, including a bunch of controversies about who did it, what it is *actually* supposed to look like, what various elements mean, etc. I am pretty much going to ignore all of that (you can use the slideshow link above if interested in some overview).
First impressions: we have a scene with a range of everyday activities, and down in the corner a pair of flailing legs that is Icarus, being completely ignored as he plops into the ocean. This is objectively funny.
Except if you linger there, in which case it gets sad and kind of awful.
This is, after all, a child. Dying not far at all from shore, and directly in front of someone who appears almost to be ignoring the death rather than not observing it. And that bird? That's the other kid Daedalus tried to murder; supposedly in the various myths, he's present at Icarus' death and crows over it, pleased that Daedalus is to be 'punished' like this. And the way Icarus's fall makes very little disturbance on the surface of the water, his soon-to-be-corpse sliding in so easily? Maybe it's just me, but if I think too long about it that's just creepy as hell.
But we zoom back out, and it's still funny when taken all together.
And that's basically the core of this painting for me — this undecided question of whether Icarus' death is funny or tragic or both.
The tension comes through a few ways visually.
First, by the way the artist plays with convention. This painting is quite possibly (probably) a smack in the face to the at-the-time-formalizing idea of 'genre hierarchy'2. In this hierarchy, weighty myth and/or historical paintings with big morals and themes are automatically the most important, while scenes of everyday life (called, confusingly, 'genre' scenes'3) are much lower down the ladder. But in this work, we have the tragic hero Icarus in the background (shown with flailing legs only), and that tiny figure is dwarfed in the foreground by a normal peasant and a horse's butt. So from the angle of conventions, the tragic-funny tension is probably quite deliberate: we get the sorrowful, romantic figure of Icarus from grand mythology, shoved into the background of a genre scene and literally upended into a joke.
There's also what's included, and where. The painting most prominently features a bunch of self-explanatory elements, but they've been laced with elements that are subtly unusual, or 'off'. These strange bits inject the sort of drama and mystery that you'd find in a more tragic work...except when they do the opposite, and are part of what helps make it funny.
The strange bit breakdown:
On the flip side, we have a world that is perfectly straightforward that keeps hinting at things we can't see, aren't connecting, or perhaps have to work to appreciate. The partridge which is actually a nearly-murdered boy. The sun, which may or may not have caused Icarus' death here...perhaps this failure was inevitable. A view which may or may not be from Daedalus. A green-swept world, which would indicate the fertility of cultivated land if connected with the foreground figures, but which is far more eerie and otherworldly if we connect it with the death of a flying boy from myth. And there's also a shepherd, looking up...
This painting gets its enduring intrigue and heat from all these slight allusions to strangeness, from the semi-supernatural qualities implied by those barely-there references to myth5. But all the time, far from being a mythology painting, this is myth eclipsed entirely by daily life. This is the abstract swallowed up by the real, with just enough left over to show the contrast.
The Icarus story, of course, has always been about the dangers of over-ambition — a literal 'pride goes before the fall' situation. And here, we seem reminded to want to be some random steady plowman, rather than an Icarus. There are so many 'brilliant' flashes that burn themselves out, while perhaps what truly endures is just the 'normal' world, the daily grind, the things that sustain lasting society. Why not be content doing what you know is useful? You can ignore all those other idiots wasting their lives on nonsense, and when some said idiot eventually falls, we can all sit around and laugh about it.
~ ○ ○ ○ ~
So FYI, there's a ton going on with this painting, including a bunch of controversies about who did it, what it is *actually* supposed to look like, what various elements mean, etc. I am pretty much going to ignore all of that (you can use the slideshow link above if interested in some overview).
First impressions: we have a scene with a range of everyday activities, and down in the corner a pair of flailing legs that is Icarus, being completely ignored as he plops into the ocean. This is objectively funny.
Except if you linger there, in which case it gets sad and kind of awful.
[Click image for larger]
This is, after all, a child. Dying not far at all from shore, and directly in front of someone who appears almost to be ignoring the death rather than not observing it. And that bird? That's the other kid Daedalus tried to murder; supposedly in the various myths, he's present at Icarus' death and crows over it, pleased that Daedalus is to be 'punished' like this. And the way Icarus's fall makes very little disturbance on the surface of the water, his soon-to-be-corpse sliding in so easily? Maybe it's just me, but if I think too long about it that's just creepy as hell.
But we zoom back out, and it's still funny when taken all together.
And that's basically the core of this painting for me — this undecided question of whether Icarus' death is funny or tragic or both.
The tension comes through a few ways visually.
First, by the way the artist plays with convention. This painting is quite possibly (probably) a smack in the face to the at-the-time-formalizing idea of 'genre hierarchy'2. In this hierarchy, weighty myth and/or historical paintings with big morals and themes are automatically the most important, while scenes of everyday life (called, confusingly, 'genre' scenes'3) are much lower down the ladder. But in this work, we have the tragic hero Icarus in the background (shown with flailing legs only), and that tiny figure is dwarfed in the foreground by a normal peasant and a horse's butt. So from the angle of conventions, the tragic-funny tension is probably quite deliberate: we get the sorrowful, romantic figure of Icarus from grand mythology, shoved into the background of a genre scene and literally upended into a joke.
There's also what's included, and where. The painting most prominently features a bunch of self-explanatory elements, but they've been laced with elements that are subtly unusual, or 'off'. These strange bits inject the sort of drama and mystery that you'd find in a more tragic work...except when they do the opposite, and are part of what helps make it funny.
The strange bit breakdown:
- This is not just *a* domestic scene, as in one scene happening. This is effectively a sort of world landscape, including several domestic vignettes (a plowman, a shepherd, a fisherman), layered in front of ships busily crisscrossing the sea (which also has a small island, with an entrance?), with cities on the shore, over which stand mountains in the far distance. Everything masterfully guides the eye through miles of depth, right on out to a horizon with a slight bend to it, which further implies the earth's curvature and a world that continues on to places we can't see. This layout is beautiful, but it's also massively improbable as a piece of realism: normally, having this dense an arrangement of these types of figures/objects (each 'representing' a type of work, or a rural-or-urban style of life) is the set-up for an allegory, or some other type of symbolism (as, for example, in a mythological painting).
- Beyond improbable, it's also impossible: we can only see everything here because of a tilted perspective that wouldn't be physically available to an observer in real life.
- And let's look at that horizon again, with a sun sitting on it. Isn't the whole crux of the Icarus story the fact that he flew too close to the sun, melting the wax holding his wings together? How could that have caused his death here if the sun is just that weak little thing way over to the side?
- Icarus wasn't flying alone, and there is a conspicuous absence of Daedalus in this painting, especially since the partridge is present to tie him back to the story more firmly. Except that we do have that tilted perspective, showing us the world as if from above...which would be Daedalus' view. Is the person looking at this work meant to be seeing through the eyes of Daedalus4?
- The colors should also get a mention. There's a cluster of earth browns in the foreground, followed by greens in the middle band, and blues on the far horizon. This is partly a handy practical way to reinforce the optical depth, but it also creates limits on how 'real' this picture can possibly look. (The green tinge especially gives the painting an odd atmosphere — or maybe it's just me, because 'round here that would be tornado weather.)
On the flip side, we have a world that is perfectly straightforward that keeps hinting at things we can't see, aren't connecting, or perhaps have to work to appreciate. The partridge which is actually a nearly-murdered boy. The sun, which may or may not have caused Icarus' death here...perhaps this failure was inevitable. A view which may or may not be from Daedalus. A green-swept world, which would indicate the fertility of cultivated land if connected with the foreground figures, but which is far more eerie and otherworldly if we connect it with the death of a flying boy from myth. And there's also a shepherd, looking up...
~ ○ ○ ○ ~
This painting gets its enduring intrigue and heat from all these slight allusions to strangeness, from the semi-supernatural qualities implied by those barely-there references to myth5. But all the time, far from being a mythology painting, this is myth eclipsed entirely by daily life. This is the abstract swallowed up by the real, with just enough left over to show the contrast.
The Icarus story, of course, has always been about the dangers of over-ambition — a literal 'pride goes before the fall' situation. And here, we seem reminded to want to be some random steady plowman, rather than an Icarus. There are so many 'brilliant' flashes that burn themselves out, while perhaps what truly endures is just the 'normal' world, the daily grind, the things that sustain lasting society. Why not be content doing what you know is useful? You can ignore all those other idiots wasting their lives on nonsense, and when some said idiot eventually falls, we can all sit around and laugh about it.
...Except, of course, when we can't. When we do feel sorry, feel horrified, feel the cruelty of that world turned away (that fisherman :( ). When we can't help but feel more like Icarus, because there's a reason that this story endures, and it's not because we all need to be warned about the dangers of using wax to achieve lift.
And so maybe we act the plowman, but we keep the tension.
And so maybe we act the plowman, but we keep the tension.
FOOTNOTES:
1. Copying paintings by 'masters' was a highly common (and accepted) practice. Sometimes these copies were simply for practice. More often, they were a way for lesser artists to turn a buck from people who liked the original but couldn't afford it.
2. Will be going into genre hierarchy more in the blog fairly soon, but in the meantime, here's an overview of the concept.
3. Think 'genre' as related to 'generic' for this usage.
4. For the record, there is another version of this painting (both may have been done off the same master original). This second version DOES include Daedalus, flying on the upper left; he's what the shepherd is looking up at. But we don't know which version is more 'accurate', and in any case I like this one a lot better, so I'm just rolling with it as-is.
5. Literally, we really only have the title ('The Fall of Icarus' in Dutch), combined with the partridge (a well-understood reference at the time) to make the concrete case that this is Icarus. All the other myth-references are far more circumstantial.
2. Will be going into genre hierarchy more in the blog fairly soon, but in the meantime, here's an overview of the concept.
3. Think 'genre' as related to 'generic' for this usage.
4. For the record, there is another version of this painting (both may have been done off the same master original). This second version DOES include Daedalus, flying on the upper left; he's what the shepherd is looking up at. But we don't know which version is more 'accurate', and in any case I like this one a lot better, so I'm just rolling with it as-is.
5. Literally, we really only have the title ('The Fall of Icarus' in Dutch), combined with the partridge (a well-understood reference at the time) to make the concrete case that this is Icarus. All the other myth-references are far more circumstantial.
COMPARE/CONTRAST PIECES: