Notice anything unusual about this picture? At first glance, it appears to be a scene from everyday medieval life. A man plows his fields with a horse. A shepherd daydreams as he tends to his flock. A ship catches the wind in its sails as it heads for the city in the distance. And in the lower right part of the painting, a man fishes on the shore.
But what’s that between the fisherman and the ship?
A pair of legs jut out of the water. Judging by the waves around it, the person attached to them is kicking frantically, trying not to drown.
This is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s, Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus.
Okay, the landscape part is obvious.
But who (and where) is Icarus?
Fall of Icarus, Jacob Peter Gowy, 1635
For those unfamiliar with Greek mythology, Icarus was an ambitious young man who wanted to know what it was like to fly. His father Daedalus, a skilled craftsman, constructed an apparatus using feathers attached by beeswax. He warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, lest the wax on his wings melt.
You know where this story is headed. The son, enchanted by flying, wanted to soar higher. He approached the sun and well....his wings failed.
It is a classic tale about the dangers of ambition, as well as the hazards of relying on new (and untested) technologies.
Jacob Peter Gowy shows us how the story is traditionally portrayed in art.
The moment is dramatic. It shows Icarus just as he begins to the fatal fall back to earth. His father, Daedalus, can only watch in horror as his son loses control .
So why did Pieter Bruegel the Elder choose to portray the end of the story rather than the more picturesque part? To show Icarus as nothing more than legs thrashing in the water?
Some suggest Bruegel did it to make a simple psychological point. That the people in the painting didn’t notice the ill-fated flight of Icarus because they were too distracted by the everyday details of their lives.
A man plummeting to his death and no one notices it?
Before we move on, let’s take a moment and watch a quick video.
Half the people who watched the video and counted the passes missed the gorilla. That’s because they were focused on something else. They were keeping track of more mundane things, like the number of times the ball was passed between people. They didn’t expect to see a gorilla in the middle of the video, just like the people in the painting didn’t expect to see a mythological figure fall from the sky. So even the people that were there to witness the fatal impact may not have “seen” it.
There is another, potentially political reason for Icarus’ incidental role in the painting. Bruegel was part of the “Mannerist” movement in the Netherlands. They believed attention should be given to “low” subject matter (the farmer plowing his field, the shepherd minding his flock) instead of “higher” more remote events (Icarus plunging into the sea). In other words, why bother focusing on nobles and their frivolous pursuits when their lives barely impact an ordinary person’s day?
It’s a fair question. One that is frequently asked of us here at Miskatonic University.
Why worry about “highly” unlikely events when there are more urgent, “real” world problems to address? Problems that are more relevant to everyday life.
I can answer that in two words.
The splash.
The “splash” in Tunguska, Siberia: 1908
The danger is in the waves that spread from the intersection between worlds. The shock waves that ricochet between worlds can be violent, with the potential to sink ships, drown shepherds, and swamp distant cities.
Icarus barely made a ripple, but the potential for disaster is still there.
That’s why we must be vigilant. Why we must always watch the skies for strange things.
We are the ones who must see the invisible gorilla.
