Online Paintings

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is a painting in oil on canvas long consideration 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 situation 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 Musee 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 Daedal us, using feathers protected 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.

Though landscape paintings with the title subject represented by small figures in the distance were an established type in Early Netherlandish painting, pioneered by Joachim Patiner, to have a much larger unrelated "genre" figure in the foreground is original and represents something of a blow against the emerging hierarchy of genres. Other landscapes by Bruegel, for example The Hunters in the Snow (1565) and others in that series of paintings showing the seasons, show genre figures in a raised foreground, but not so large relative to the size of the image, nor with a subject from a "higher" class of painting in the background.