Pieter Bruegel the Elder(1525?-1569)
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
c. 1558
Oil on canvas, mounted on wood
73.5 x 112 cm
Musees royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels
Painting is the philosophy of the parallel of time. Everything can happen in one. In this almost humorous picture of the Flemish painter we see an at fist instance innocent landscape with a farmer plowing and a shepherd in the foreground and ships in the bay heading for a harbor. The philosophy is in the little man and the feathers in the sky just before the ship. According the artist we must see it as an Icarus that burnt its wings and thus fell down. Falling in the water is a Dutch expression of failure. Why this failure with a fine natural reality of man and its normal routines? What is wrong with simply being happy, why did Icarus try to catch the sun? It is God that cannot be captured that simple according the myth. Although man at the time lived pretty close to nature, Bruegel shows us the classical drama. Not really in respect with the sun, but jealous with it as an object of desire one falls down. At the time clocks began to appear in church towers to lead man in relating to the order of Gods nature and the sun. The burning Icarus is thus a warning to that. With the reality of time one will burn ones wings being overly ambitious, conceited or abusive lacking consciousness and selfcorrection making a false mechanical authority to the sun and to God, even though at that time the human effort to do so seems to be ridiculous against the massive beauty and peace of the unconcerned natural order of time.
