Lecture 26: Pieter Bruegel the Elder
The Fall of Icarus (c. 1558) is from a well-known story related by Ovid.
Icarus and his father, Daedalus, are À ying with wings, designed by Daedalus,
to escape from their exile on Crete. Despite being warned by his father,
when Icarus À ew too close to the Sun, the wax that held the wings in
place melted and he fell to Earth. This is an original depiction of the ¿ nal
moment of the drama, with Icarus disappearing into the sea unnoticed by
the others in the scene. There is a ploughman in the foreground, a shepherd
who stares upward at something. The sea extends from the bottom of the
hill to the horizon, with a few ships and a mountainous shoreline and a
large ship with billowing sails. This wide worldview is characteristic of
northern painting. At the stern of the ship, near the shore, Icarus’s tiny legs
stick out above the water. W. H. Auden describes this picture in his poem
“Musée des Beaux Arts”:About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position...
In Bruegel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.Our next painting shows Mad Meg (Dulle Griet) (c. 1562–1564). Griet is
diminutive for Margaret and is also a traditional Netherlandish folk name
for shrewish or quarrelsome women. Dulle means angry or wrathful in this
context, not crazy. We see many Bosch-like details—¿ sh, egg shapes, hybrid
demonic creatures, transparent bubbles, and a hellish conÀ agration in the
background. At right, women on a bridge vie for coins that are produced for
them from the behind of a large ¿ gure in green and pink seated on a roof.The whole scene is hell, but Satan is apparently the whale-like monster at the
left with a gaping mouth and staring eye. The huge ¿ gure of Mad Meg strides
across the landscape with a bundle of booty. She wears a helmet, breastplate,