Icarus Myth Essay

700 Words3 Pages
“Daedalus and Icarus” is a well-known story in ancient Greek mythology. In the story, King Minos put Daedalus and his son, Icarus, into an island called Crete. Wanting to escape, Daedalus used feather with wax to build two pairs of wings on his son’s back. Before they took off from the island, Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too high or too low, or his wings might be melted by the sun or get wet by the water in the sea. Ignoring his father’s advice, Icarus flew too close to the sun and eventually, the wax on his wings melted. Unfortunately, Icarus fell into the sea and drowned. Brueghel’s painting, Auden and Sexton’s poems are related to this tragedy; however, they all describe the story in different ways from each others. “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” painted by Pieter Brueghel, is his only painting using mythological theme. In this painting, it is clear that no one — the ploughman, the shepherd, and the angler — cared about Icarus at all when he was drowning into the sea, not even the ship, which was leaving the port. The ploughman was cultivating the land with the horse, and was facing in the opposite direction from Icarus; while the shepherd was grazing the ships, and looking up on the sky; and the angler was still fishing without seeing Icarus’s legs above the water, and recognizing that Icarus was drowning, even he was the closest man to Icarus in the painting. In Brueghel’s point of view, he thinks that no one is paying attention to Icarus when he fell into the sea. His painting shows that all other people were doing their own work and were ignoring the fall of Icarus. In addition to that, Icarus is shown as the smallest figure in the entire painting, which indicates that how insignificant he was to other people. From Brueghel’s perspective, he thinks that life goes on whether we face something happy or sad. “Musee des Beaux Arts,” by

More about Icarus Myth Essay

Open Document