Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca 1525-1569), Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, ca 1555, oil on canvas, mounted on wood
Landschap met de Val van Icarus

According to Ovid in his Metamorphoses, Daedalus who was shut up in a tower on the Crete island, fashioned artificial wings for himself and his son Icarus to fly away from imprisonment. The wing feathers having been secured with wax, Icarus succeeded in taking flight, but ignoring his father’s warning, overexalted he flew too close to the sun melting the wax, and he fell into the sea and drowned.

However, Icarus is not the focus of the painting. To the far right, detachedly painted, the two legs and the one hand floundering in the water are those of Icarus drowning. His fall goes unnoticed, the farmer placidly doing his ploughing, the shepherd leaning on his staff and taking care of his animals, the angler observing his fishing rod and line, all of them mentioned in Ovid’s text. But a painting that is supposed to illustrate a fall from the sky, surprisingly shows only the fall’s ultimate effect as an insignificant happening, Bruegel indeed focussing on depicting the everyday concerns and tasks of the average people shown in his painting.

There is more than one explanation possible with regard to Bruegel’s painting. One view is that of the conviction of people’s inherent attitude of disregard, deliberate or not, to other people’s suffering. A moderate view is that people, so preoccupied with their own affairs, are simply unaware of other people’s misfortune. A different view, more connected to Icarus’ failed experience, is that pride goes before a fall and that it is absurd to try to surpass the natural limits of the human condition. Generally, it can be accepted that in Bruegel’s view death and suffering are invariably components of ever ongoing life.