Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

This article is about the Bruegel painting. For the poem by William Carlos Williams, see Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (poem). For other uses, see The Fall of Icarus (disambiguation).

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, now seen as a good early copy of Bruegel's original

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is a painting in oil on canvas (73.5 by 112 centimetres (28.9 in × 44.1 in)) in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels. It was long thought to be by to Pieter Bruegel. However, following technical examinations in 1996 of the painting hanging in the Brussels museum that attribution is regarded as very doubtful, and the painting, perhaps painted in the 1560s, is now usually seen as a good early copy by an unknown artist of Bruegel's lost original, although recent technical research has re-opened the question.

Largely derived from Ovid, the painting is described in W. H. Auden's famous poem Musée des Beaux-Arts, named after the museum in Brussels which holds the painting, and became the subject of a poem of the same name by William Carlos Williams, as well as Lines on Bruegel's "Icarus" by Michael Hamburger.

Description

File:Fall of Icarus - Brueghel -Museum van Buuren.jpg

"Landscape with The Fall of Icarus", ca. 1590-95, oil on wood (63 by 90 centimetres (25 in × 35 in)), Circle of P.Bruegel the Elder, Museum van Buuren, Brussels, Belgium.

In Greek mythology, Icarus succeeded in flying, with wings made by his father Daedalus, using feathers secured 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. Daedalus does not appear in this version of the painting, though he does, still flying, in the van Buuren one (see below).

The ploughman, shepherd and angler are mentioned in Ovid's account of the legend; they are: "astonished and think to see gods approaching them through the aether", which is not entirely the impression given in the painting. The shepherd gazing into the air, away from the ship, may be explained by another version of the composition (see below); in the original work there was probably also a figure of Daedalus in the sky to the left, at which he stares. There is also a Flemish proverb (of the sort imaged in other works by Bruegel): "And the farmer continued to plough..." (En de boer ... hij ploegde voort") pointing out the ignorance of people to fellow men's suffering. The painting may, as Auden's poem suggests, depict humankind's indifference to suffering by highlighting the ordinary events which continue to occur, despite the unobserved death of Icarus.

Though the world landscape, a type of work with the title subject represented by small figures in the distance, was 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.

Attribution

File:Der Sturz des Ikarus (Ausschnitt).jpg

Icarus and the angler

The painting is probably a version of a lost original by Bruegel, probably from the 1560s or soon after. It is in oils whereas Bruegel's other paintings on canvas are in tempera.

The work was unknown until it was bought by the museum in 1912; subsequently another version on panel, generally considered inferior, turned up, which was acquired in 1953 by Daniel van Buuren for his private house, today a museum in Brussels. In this, which excludes the far left and right sides of the composition, Icarus is in the water but Daedelus is still in the air, and the shepherd's gaze is directed at him, explaining one aspect of the composition of the other version. The original would have been Bruegel's only known painting of a mythological subject. The perspective of the ship and figures is not entirely consistent, although this may enhance the power of the composition. Bruegel also produced a design for an engraving with the ship and the two falling figures.

Since its acquisition by the Museum in 1912, its authenticity has been controverted by several specialists, mainly for two reasons: (i) its weaker quality due to overpainting; (ii) it is an oil painting on canvas, an exception in the work of Peter Bruegel the Elder who made all his oil paintings on panel.

In 1963, Philippe Roberts-Jones, curator at the museum, and the Bruegel specialist Georges Marlier, hypothesized that an original panel painting had been later moved onto canvas, as was once common. In 1998, a mixed team of scientists from the Belgian Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage and the University of Utrecht attempted to solve the authenticity problem by a radiocarbon dating of the canvas that was supposed to be the original support. As mentioned here above, the conclusion of this dating was that P. Bruegel the Elder cannot have painted on this canvas. Later, in 2006, Prof. J. Reisse (Université libre de Bruxelles) demonstrated that this dating was worthless for technical arguments.

File:Schädel im Gehölz.jpg

The upturned face in the bushes

A sample of blue paint taken from the right edge in 1973 was re-examined by performing analysis such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM) coupled to the energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), which in connection with optical microscopy revealed the following structure and composition. From bottom to top:

1. Canvas (from transposition);
2. Oily lead white (adhesive);
3. Thick oily layer with azurite (repaint);
4. Chalk ground;
5. Oily lead white with scarce particles of charcoal;
6. Oily blue with azurite;

with layers 4 to 6 being original.

The presence of chalk ground under the original blue proves that this is a panel painting transposed on a canvas. The original blue layer is lead white with azurite containing a few grains of ochre and charcoal. These structure and composition match perfectly those found on other certified panels of Peter Bruegel. Moreover it is noticeable that the wood charcoal particles are very peculiar, being very long and acicular, exactly the same as those found only in The Census from the same Museum.

File:Joos de Momper Icarus.JPG

This related work by Joos de Momper includes the ploughman and angler, but Icarus is still in flight, with wax drops falling.

Recently, a study of the underdrawing using infrared reflectography has been published. Reflectography is based on the fact that the infrared light penetrates all colors except black. As a result, the drawing, mostly black can be made visible. The interpretation of these reflectograms is of course more subjective, but in a global way, the drawing from the Fall of Icarus is not really different from other certified works from Peter Bruegel the Elder. This drawing is generally limited to a layout of the elements. Probably because the thin, weakly covering paint on white ground would hide imperfectly a detailed graphism. A re-interpretation of the reflectograms in agreement with the other analysis would lead to the following conclusion: The Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, from the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels is an oil painting on panel, transposed on canvas. The paint layer and maybe also the underdrawing have been severely damaged by this intervention as well as by two more relinings, responsible for the heavy overpainting. In the paint sample remains a fragment with structure and composition matching perfectly the technique of the large panels attributed to Peter Bruegel the Elder. It is therefore inconceivable that this version of the Fall of Icarus might be from the hand of a copyist, except perhaps from P. Bruegel the Younger. Conversely, the Van Buuren copy with a different technique cannot be attributed to Peter Bruegel neither Father or Son.

Mentions in other media

The painting is shown in Nicholas Roeg's film The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), where a character opens a book of paintings to an image of it. On the facing page a description points out that the scene remains calm, the event of the fall hardly noticed.

Eric Steele, whose film The Bridge (2006) documents the suicides of two-dozen people who jumped off the world's most popular suicide site - the Golden Gate Bridge - throughout 2004, has compared images captured in his documentary to those of Bruegel’s Landscape With the Fall of Icarus, because the fatal leaps go almost unnoticed by passersby.

Composer Brian Ferneyhough's 1988 chamber work La Chute d'Icare was inspired by the painting:

What this piece attempts to suggest is ... less a reflection on the heroic-tragic dimension of the underlying myth than a transcription of the strange sensation of “already having been” which is brilliantly evoked by Breughel in the view of a world serenely pursuing its own concerns, completely oblivious to the almost invisible tiny pair of legs waving pathetically out of the water, the only record of the apocalyptic event being a pair of feathers floating disconsolately down in the wake of their erstwhile owner.

Further reading

• de Vries, Lyckle, "Bruegel's "Fall of Icarus": Ovid or Solomon?", Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, Vol. 30, No. 1/2 (2003), pp. 4–18, Stichting voor Nederlandse Kunsthistorische Publicaties, JSTOR

External links

• Museum & Gardens Van Buuren