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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
Peter Bruegel's The Fall of Icarus—his only painting with a mythological subject—has long been seen as an allegory: Charles de Tolnay has shown how Bruegel took the details which he found in Ovid and used them, contrary to the accepted tradition of his time, to contrast the futility of Icarus' venture with the solid worth of the peasant labourer's life. Ovid, like Bruegel's contemporaries (for the most part), emphasized the wonder and novelty of the flight: the people in his landscape stopped in the middle of their tasks to wonder at the god-like beings who flew so effortlessly above them:
hos aliquis tremula dum captat harundine pisces aut pastor baculo stivave innixus arator vidit et obstipuit, quique aethera carpere possent credidit esse deos.
page 50 note 1 The version which hangs in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Brussels is followed in this article. It is reproduced in The Paintings of Bruegel by Grossmann, F. (London, 1955)Google Scholar, plate 3a. The ‘Herbrand’ version (which Grossmann, 190, prefers) differs principally in that Daedalus is visible in the sky.
page 50 note 2 de Tolnay, C., Pierre Bruegel l'Ancien, 2 vols. (Brussels, 1935). See vol. i, 27–29Google Scholar, for interpretation; vol. ii, plates 4–7 (figs. 6–13) for illustrations. De Tolnay's inter pretation is developed by Stridbeck, C. G., Bruegelstudien. Stockholm Studies in the History of Art 2 (Stockholm 1956), 235–42.Google Scholar
page 50 note 3 Ovid, Met. viii. 217–20.Google Scholar Cf. Ovid, Ars Am. ii. 78–‘vidit et inceptum dextra reliquit opus’.Google Scholar
page 50 note 4 But see below, p. 53.
page 50 note 5 Auden, W. H., Musée des Beaux-Arts.Google Scholar
page 51 note 1 Ovid, , Met. viii. 236–8Google Scholar:
hunc (sc. Daedalum) miseri tumulo ponentem corpora nati
garrula lirnoso prospexit ab elice perdix
et plausit pennis testataque gaudia cantu est.
Note Ovid's onomatopoeia—alliteration of p four times in one and a half lines, and a succession of harsh dentals and gutturals (d, t, g, c).
page 51 note 2 Grossmann, F., op. cit. 14–17Google Scholar: for the itinerary Grossmann refers to Benesch, O., Kunstchronik vi (1953), 76.Google Scholar
page 51 note 3 See SirClark, Kenneth, Landscape into Art, Penguin Books (London, 1956), 22 and plate 4.Google Scholar
page 51 note 4 Ibid., 67–68.
page 52 note 1 See le Grelle, G. S. J., ‘Le premier livre des Géorgiques: poème pythagoricien’, Les Études classiques 17 (1949), 139–245Google Scholar, for the bearing of Pythagoreanism on the structure of the poem. Le Grelle shows decisively that 94–99 was the heart (his term is foyer) of the first part.
page 52 note 2 Other implements at lines 160–6; the plough at 169–75. For Virgil's plough see Gow, A. S. F., JHS 34 (1914), 249–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Aitken, R., JRS 46 (1956), 96–106.Google Scholar Bruegel's 16th-century plough of course differs considerably: for example it is drawn by a horse, not an ox; it has no temo; it is wheeled (wheeled ploughs evidently reached Italy in the first century A.d. according to Pliny, , NH xviii. 173)Google Scholar: instead of the curved buris it has a beam joining the wheel assembly and the stiva strengthened by a strut.
page 52 note 3 Like Milton's Mulciber, Icarus ‘with the setting sun / Dropt from the Zenith like a falling star’.
page 52 note 4 De Tolnay quotes the French proverbs ‘L'épée et l'argent demandent les mains intelligentes’ and ‘ce qu'on sème sur les rochers n'y peut croître’.
page 52 note 5 Cf. Jeremiah 17. IIGoogle Scholar: ‘As the partridge sitteth on eggs, and hatcheth them not; so he that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool.’
page 53 note 1 So Stridbeck, , op. cit. 355, note 17.Google Scholar
page 53 note 2 Virgil elsewhere connects the plough and death: see Georg. iii. 517–19:Google Scholar
… it tristis arator
maerentem abiungens fraterna morte iuvencum,
atque opere in medio defixa relinquit aratra.
For the ‘Golden Age’ as a time of over-primitive simplicity, from which only progress could be made, see especially Georg. i. 121–5 and 147–9.Google Scholar
