Deborah L. Boughton
At first glance Pieter Brueghel's painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus seems to be one of the peaceful, tranquil "postcard-like" scenes referred to earlier. For this viewing, I would not give students the title of the painting or reveal that it was crafted in 1558. Instead, as per the VTS, I would question students asking them: What is going on in the picture? Next I would follow up any type of interpretive observation with the question, what do you see that makes you say that? I imagine that students will be able to identify the prominent figures in the painting: the man plowing the field, the shepherd herding the sheep, the boats sailing down the river. The students will also be likely to make the inference that this picture takes place "in the olden times" because of the design of the ships, the architecture, the occupations of the people etc. As I encourage students to continue looking, they are likely to see the two legs that are sticking out of the water, ready to disappear. Students are likely to infer that someone has fallen into the water. What's problematic is that it is unclear where the figure has fallen from. The shore and the ship are far away from the small pair of legs. At this juncture I might give students the title of the painting. Most students will need to be reminded that Icarus is a figure from Greek mythology, the boy who with the help of his father, crafts a pair of wings out of wax and feathers. Of course, he disregards his father's warning and flies too close to the sun. The wax melts and he plunges to his death.
Brueghel's painting does an interesting retelling of the myth, by making the boy's fall appear to be a rather insignificant event. Hopefully students will notice that no other figures in the painting seem to have noticed the fall and that all movement in the painting flows away from Icarus. Hopefully students will begin to wonder: If the painting is about Icarus, why are his little drowning legs hardly noticeable?
The myth of Icarus really tempts students to return to an old habit of needing to find "a lesson" or "a moral to the story." I think that if I were to ask students what impression Brueghel might have wanted to leave with the viewer they might say, "You should listen to your parents." However, when asked to substantiate this claim with evidence from the painting, they would have difficulty. At this point, I might bring W.H. Auden and William Carlos Williams into the conversation by introducing Auden's "Musée de Beaux Arts" (1940) and Williams's "Landscape with Fall of Icarus" (1962). Both poets comment on Brueghel's painting in different styles, tones and forms. However, both arrive at a similar conclusion: Brueghel is commenting on how indifferent human beings can be to the suffering of others. The poems can help students arrive at a deeper reading of the painting, but can also be analyzed as works of art within themselves. Both poets arrive at a similar conclusion in very different ways. For example, critics have pointed out that the Williams poem is arranged in a vertical column, "recalling the body plummeting from the sky."
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Reading this painting and the poems lays the groundwork for the lesson that follow. Certainly Brueghel, Williams and Auden were each commenting on the indifference they had seen in their own worlds.