Icarus Unbound

While doing research on Brueghel, I read John Canaday’s thoughtful and articulate summary biography of Brueghel in his The Lives of the Painters. He calls Brueghel an “extraordinarily complex painter-philosopher” who believed that man was one part of an organically connected universe. He writes that Brueghel’s paintings are “reflections upon the nature of man, his relationship to himself and his small world and to the cosmos as his world turned through its seasons.” Unlike the Romantic poets, Brueghel did not personify nature or endow it with emotions. In other words, Brueghel painted the harmony between working man and living nature.

Canaday goes on to state that Brueghel has shown in his paintings that “when man breaks from nature, he becomes the victim of his own frailties.” Unlike the ancient Greeks who believed that man is noble but fated with a tragic flaw, for Brueghel “the flaw is no longer tragic but contemptible because remediable.” I see a connection between this philosophy and Brueghel’s “treatment” of Daedalus in leaving him out of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. It is the landscape that gets top billing and Daedalus who gets none. What Daedalus did in making wings was not in harmony with nature as Ovid pointed out. It gets more complicated, however, when we consider that Brueghel was living during the Reformation--a time of great social, political and religious upheaval.

Specifically it was a time when Brueghel’s Netherlands were being devastated by the Spanish military force of Phillip II. (Husband of “Bloody” Mary, Queen of England until her death in 1558; the king who sent the Spanish Armada to England in 1588 to overthrow Elizabeth I and her Protestant regime; that Phillip II.) He sent one of his generals, the Duke of Alba to the Netherlands for the purpose of seeking out heretics. Alba had unlimited power and set up the Council of Troubles which condemned without trial those suspected of heresy and rebellion. Calvinists called it the Council of Blood. This occurred in 1567, two years before Brueghel’s death but the atmosphere of intolerance had been brewing for decades (probably since Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses perhaps on the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Germany on October 31, 1517. Interestingly that is the Wittenberg where Hamlet and his friend Horatio attended university; but I digress.)

In such an atmosphere, it seems to me, the mythical manipulations of Daedalus could be associated with those of Alba. Thus, as Auden contends, the death of Icarus is “not an important failure” since there were worse failures closer to home. And when we consider that Auden writes his poem in 1938, in an atmosphere of the impending catastrophe that was World War II, we can’t blame him for feeling empathy at the indifference Brueghel’s painting shows toward Icarus’s tragedy.