JAVIER PERROUD
TLON VOL. II
ART & PHILOSOPY
Icarus
by Robert Graves
The Fall of Icarus was an oil on canvas work undertaken by Jacob Peter Gowy, between 1636 and 1638. The Fall of Icarus, depicts one of the most famous events from the surviving stories of Greek mythology.
Icarus was the son of Daedalus, and father and son were imprisoned by King Minos following Theseus' killing of the Minotaur.
Daedalus came up with a method of escape for Icarus and himself, and with wings attached, they flew from the island of Crete. Icarus was warned about the dangers of the sun on the wax that held the feathers together, but Icarus flew too close to the sun, resulting in Icarus falling to his death.
The Fall of Icarus - (c1610–c1660)
by Jacob Peter Gowy
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is a painting in oil on canvas measuring 73.5 by 112 centimetres (28.9 in × 44.1 in) now in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels. It was long thought to be by the leading painter of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. 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, perhaps from about 1558. According to the museum: "It is doubtful the execution is by Bruegel the Elder, but the composition can be said with certainty to be his",[1][2]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.[3]
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1560 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
In Greek mythology, Icarus is the son of the master craftsman Daedalus. Often depicted in art, Icarus and his father attempt to escape from Crete by means of wings that his father constructed from feathers and wax. Icarus' father warns him first of complacency and then of hubris, asking that he not fly too low nor too high because the sea's dampness would clog, and the sun's heat would melt his wings. Icarus ignored instructions not to fly too close to the sun, and the melting wax caused him to fall into the sea where he drowned. This tragic theme of failed ambition contains similarities to that of Phaëthon.
Icarus's father Daedalus, a talented and remarkable Athenian craftsman, built the Labyrinth for King Minos of Crete near his palace at Knossos to imprison the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster born of his wife and the Cretan bull. Minos imprisoned Daedalus himself in the labyrinth because he gave Minos' daughter, Ariadne, a clew (or ball of string) in order to help Theseus, the enemy of Minos, to survive the Labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur.
Daedalus fashioned two pairs of wings out of wax and feathers for himself and his son. Daedalus tried his wings first, but before taking off from the island, warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, nor too close to the sea, but to follow his path of flight. Overcome by the giddiness that flying lent him, Icarus soared through the sky curiously, but in the process he came too close to the sun, which melted the wax. Icarus kept flapping his wings but soon realized that he had no feathers left and that he was only flapping his bare arms, and so Icarus fell into the sea in the area which today bears his name, the Icarian Sea near Icaria, an island southwest of Samos.
Hellenistic writers give euhemerising variants in which the escape from Crete was actually by boat, provided by Pasiphaë, for which Daedalus invented the first sails, to outstrip Minos' pursuing galleys, and that Icarus fell overboard en route to Sicily and drowned. Heracles erected a tomb for him.
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