W.H. Auden 's "Musee des Beaux Arts" and "The Story of Daedalus and Icarus"

"About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."

This poem was written after Auden had visited the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussel in 1938. The first stanza makes a general statement about paintings Auden viewed. Some argue that Pieter Brueghel the Elder's Census at Bethlehem is the painting being described. Auden names the Brueghel painting being interpreted in the second stanza: Landscape With the Fall of Icarus is the full title. It can be seen here:
http://cgfa.acropolisinc.com/bruegel1/p-brue1-10.htm

Just as Auden's poem uses a painting to make a statement, Brueghel translates one of the stories in Ovid's Metamorphoses into painting.  (Ovid, of course, takes his "Story of Daedalus and Icarus" from Greek mythology.) I want to compare and contrast all three works looking specifically at differences and possible reasons for the changes of interpretation.