1/31/2024 0 Comments Landscape with the fall of icarusUnfortunately, Icarus did not heed his father’s warnings to avoid flying too high or too low, and in his exuberance of flight drew near to the sun, let the wax melt on his wings, and plummeted to his death. The wax melted and he fell into the sea and drowned.Pieter Bruegel’s oil painting on canvas, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c.1560s), derives from Ovid’s telling of the story of Icarus, a boy who was given wings fashioned by his father so that the two together could flee imprisonment. However, when both successfully left the labyrinth and flew above the sea, Icarus was seized with a sense of adventure and flew higher than would have been good for him. Not too close to the water, where it was too humid, but also not too close to the sun, where it was too warm. He built wings for his son and himself, made of feathers and wax, and admonished his son to always fly "in the middle". However, the clever head devised a way of escape. As punishment, Minos imprisoned Daedalus and Icarus in the great labyrinth. It is possible that Daedalus helped Theseus to defeat the Minotaur. The Minotaur was a hybrid of man and bull, to whom numerous young people had to be sacrificed every year. But Daedalus, recognized as a murderer, had to flee from Greece and came to Crete, where he built the famous labyrinth for Minos to keep the Minotaur imprisoned there. He was to be afraid of heights for the rest of his life. However, the latter was caught by Athena and transformed into a partridge. To get him out of the way, Daedalus pushed Perdix off the Acropolis. However, when his sister apprenticed her son Perdix to him, the latter showed so much talent and skill that Daedalus felt threatened by him as a competitor. The latter was a famous and gifted inventor, artist and scientist, capable of creating technical marvels. However, the narrative begins with the father of the unfortunate, Daedalus. The episode shown here is described in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Now the episode, which was inserted here, as casually, into the picture, opens up: Icarus, in his flight, came too close to the sun and fell into the sea. We look further down to the right, where a large sailing ship majestically moves away from us and now finally reveals the motif that gives the episode its title: two bare legs still stick out of the water, above them individual feathers can be seen. If we follow his view and also look into the sky, we recognize, except a few dark clouds in the left background at first nothing special. The herd has made itself comfortable on the shore. Immediately behind him, a shepherd leans on his staff and looks up to the sky. His intense red shirt makes him even more present in the otherwise green, blue and yellow landscape. He is in the lower center of the picture and can only be seen from behind. A farmer with his plow can immediately catch our gaze. The theme of the picture is not immediately recognizable, at first glance seems to be implemented here a genre scene, which illustrates the everyday life of the rural population. We look from an elevated vantage point on a seascape, which is animated by a few people.
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