Landscape with the Fall of Icarus shows a world that does not stop for a dying boy. A ploughman, a shepherd and a fisherman go on with their day while Icarus drowns in a corner of the canvas, and the ship beside him does not turn. The meaning is indifference: disaster happens at the edge of other people's ordinary lives.
The scene comes from the myth told by Ovid. Daedalus made wings of feathers and wax to escape the island of Crete, his son Icarus flew too high, and the sun melted the wax. The canvas hangs in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels, where it is credited to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, with a question mark.
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Ovid told the scene differently. In his version, a fisherman, a shepherd and a ploughman look up and see the father and son flying, and they stop, astonished, sure they are watching gods.
Ovid also gives the fall a mourner. The father turns, calls "Where are you, Icarus?", and finds nothing on the water but feathers. In the poem, the people who saw the two fliers stopped everything to stare. Nobody went about their business.
The ploughman in the painting never raises his eyes. That change is the whole picture. So who made it? The answer is less certain than the museum label suggests.
Where is Icarus in the painting?
In the bottom right corner, and easy to miss. Two legs kick in the water just below the stern of a large ship. No wings, no face, no fall through the air. Only the last splash.
The foreground belongs to a ploughman in a red shirt. A shepherd stands in the middle distance, gazing at the sky. A fisherman sits with his back to the water. A four-masted ship sails on, and the sun hangs half-set on the horizon, a long way off.
A partridge perches in the bushes above the fisherman. Ovid's story has a partridge too. Perdix, the nephew of Daedalus, was thrown from a tower out of jealousy and turned into the bird. The Royal Museums read the bird as a reference to him. Nowhere on the canvas is there a signature.
What You'll Discover
Whose hand painted this canvas.
Where Daedalus went.
What a poet saw in Brussels.