Pieter Bruegel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus"

When I found Pieter Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, I knew that it was the image that I wanted to use for the last part of this project. The more I looked at it, in terms of the needs of the project, the more its message connected with the ideas I wanted to somehow develop around the term apoptosis and the push and pull of interdependent associations that connects the healthcare debate with the reality of cancer.

Pieter Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, (1560s), Oil on Canvas.

Pieter Bruegel (c. 1525 – 1569) was a Flemish painter known for painting canonical images of common people in villages, landscapes, and crowded city squares. Although I am not too familiar with Bruegel’s work, it is clear that Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is making an interesting statement about the importance of routine, humble working life in relation to change or something out of the ordinary pattern of operating or thinking that regulates traditional village life. Ethan Matt Kavaler, in Pieter Bruegel: Parables of Order and Enterprise (1999), describes Bruegel’s body of work as critical of the cultural issues of his time in the following passage:

Rather than introduce new types into Netherlandish art, Bruegel helped adapt this imagery, still relatively young, into an expanded visual vocabulary for addressing critical issues in the culture. Paintings, drawings, and prints frame customary actions and events in unexpected ways, presenting the world as a place of conflict, of opposing values, forces, and natural drives. [His] pictures could evoke ideas of fixed, natural hierarchy and of more fluid urban structures, of community and individuality, of social distance and the immediate experience of human relationships. Inevitably, they confronted different notions of order and authority. We might view [his] works partly as a means of comprehending and coping with shifting ideologies, as medium of crisis management. (Kavaler 1)

Breughel paints the disastrous result of Ovid’s story of Icarus’ famous flight in Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Icarus, against his father’s wishes, flies too close to the sun and the wax holding the feathers of his wings together melts, causing him to plummet into the sea. Breughel’s painting, as his title suggests, is concerned with the landscape and Icarus’ fall—the back story, while implied, is secondary to the painting’s main message. Brueghel depicts a calm, late day landscape scene of a port village with villagers going about their daily tasks. A ploughman, the largest, central figure, carefully carves a lawn to create what looks like steps with a horse-drawn plough at the forefront of the painting. Underneath him, on a promontory between him and the sea, a shepherd with his sheep leans on his crook and gazes up toward graying clouds, perhaps considering the fact that it might rain. To the right of the painting, further down in elevation from the shepherd, a fisherman fishes with a small cup of (presumably) bait, by his side. A partridge perches above him on an extended branch. Kavaler, contrasting similar imagery in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, suggests that the partridge symbolizes moderation—thereby encapsulating, at least at first glance, and perhaps ironically (as the partridge stands precariously on a branch on the same level of the largest figure, the ploughman, but spatially between the fisherman and the fallen Icarus), the mood of humble industry that the landscape scene suggests.

The partridge beside the fisherman must refer to Perdix, the nephew whom Daedulus cast from the acropolis in a fit of professional jealousy inspired by the boy’s artistic promise. Athena saved Perdix, transforming him into a partridge and thus permitting him to witness Daedulus’s own son perish. Perdix-turned-partridge was a metamorphosis that harmonized with the larger themes of the painting, since, as Ovid informs us, this bird avoids flying high or building its nest on towering cliffs – the very image of moderation. (60)

Kavaler writes that the “rocky outcropping with high cliffs” taking up the upper left portion of the painting, under the graying clouds, “suggest the fortress from which Daedulus and Icarus made their escape” (60). The sea and the background landscape take up the rest of the painting:

The wide sea that limits the foreground stage and covers most of the visible earth leads us to a world of travel and trade, of ships destined for various ports depicted or intimated. And the sky is illuminated by a golden radiance, a semicircular haze of light that touches the water at the horizon, where it meets the setting sun. (58)

In an image of prosperity, with fully extended sails, a boat, leaves the village port, sailing right by the fallen Icarus. Icarus, the subject of the painting, is barely noticeable as a pair of legs splashing into the sea at the right of the painting, between the fisherman and the boat.

Bruegel clearly manipulates the viewer with the title of his painting and its subject material: Icarus’ splashing legs are a small, irrelevant event among a wealth of landscape imagery and figures that are otherwise preoccupied with their daily lives. While there are many other odd inconsistencies in the painting, which might be interesting to explore, I want to try to use this main idea as my first story: a tragedy happens and nobody notices because people don’t fall out of the sky—there is no rule in sixteenth century culture for the apprehension of such an anomaly, so it doesn’t exist to the figures in the painting. The contemporary equivalent related to the healthcare policy issue is that if healthcare in America doesn’t change, the things that might appear to be neatly functioning as they should will steadily reveal Icarus-like disasters that are less easy to ignore: escalating insurance premiums, higher co-pays, decreased quality of care, more people without basic healthcare insurance, and more debt, for example. Bruegel’s painting might depict the cultural problems of another era, but, using the ideas in his painting, with all of their obvious and less obvious meanings, the issues he addresses can be taken out of their original context and used to say something about stasis in a healthcare system that follows rules that can no longer accommodate the contemporary social, cultural, and economic environment. To have ignored the problems in the system (if healthcare reform did not get enough votes to pass), would have had the same effect as multiplying them (there is a clear analogy here to the various meanings of the term apoptosis).