The fall of Icarus is the Greek myth of a boy who flew on wings of feathers and wax built by his father Daedalus, climbed too close to the sun, and drowned when the wax melted. The picture usually meant by the phrase is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus in Brussels, made after a design by Pieter Bruegel the Elder around 1558, in which the whole disaster is a pair of legs in the water.
Painters have gone back to the story for centuries, and each one has picked a different moment. Some show Daedalus buckling the wings onto his son, others the plunge, others the mourning on the shore. Bruegel picked the smallest moment of all, a boy who has already gone under, and surrounded him with people at work.
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Those people at work are not Bruegel's invention. They come from Ovid, who tells the story in the eighth book of his Metamorphoses. In the middle of the flight he stops to imagine who might be watching from the ground: a fisherman casting his rod, a shepherd leaning on his crook, a plowman who raises his eyes from the furrow. In Ovid's telling they are astonished, and they take the two flyers for gods.
Bruegel kept all three witnesses and changed what they do. In the Brussels canvas the plowman keeps his eyes on the furrow, the shepherd looks somewhere else, and the fisherman keeps fishing. Nobody takes anyone for a god, because nobody turns toward the boy.
Whether the painters who came after him kept that silence or broke it is what the works below settle one by one, from Saraceni in Rome to a paper cut out made in the middle of a war.
What You'll Discover
Who really painted the Brussels canvas.
Who finally points at the fall.
What Daedalus does while his son falls.
Who gathers around Draper's dead Icarus.
What Matisse cut from paper.