“About suffering, they were never wrong…”

Last weekend, The Missus and I visited the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. By the time you’ve seen (say) your 500th painting in one day, it’s tempting to claim they all look pretty much alike. Tempting, and wrong. Many of them sort of blend together, true. (In the Renaissance galleries, I lost count of the number of paintings titled “Portrait of a Young Man.”) But some always stand out, and leave their hooks in place long after you’ve laid eyes on them.

The painting above was done by Pieter Brueghel the Elder in 1558; its title is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. (You can click the image to see a larger version.) It looks unremarkable, on first glance: a fairly typical (albeit expertly done) late-Renaissance rendering of a fairly typical pastoral/nautical subject. A — yes — a landscape.

But Icarus? Where’s Icarus?

Just in case you don’t know the Greek mythological story, here’s Wikipedia’s brief version:

Daedalus fashioned a pair of wax wings for himself and his son [Icarus]. Before they took off from the island, Daedalus warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, nor too close to the sea. Overcome by the sublime feeling that flying gave him, Icarus soared through the sky joyfully, but in the process he came too close to the sun, which melted his wings. Icarus kept flapping his wings but soon realized that he had no feathers left and that he was only flapping his bare arms. And so, Icarus fell into the sea…

So then. In the painting, Icarus must be falling. Perhaps in that bright sunlight-glowing area of the sky, just right of center; such an intensely lighted area certainly draws the eye… No? Then maybe it’s what the shepherd is looking up at — after all, he’s placed dead-center in the painting, so he must be important. Right?

Well, no. Here’s where Icarus is:

Yeah: tucked away almost in the bottom right corner, ignored by all the visible human figures. That shepherd in the center, far from being the only one who knows what’s going on, is completely missing the “most important” part of the scene. The guy all the way at the bottom right, who comes closest to looking in the right direction, is instead simply tending to his net. Even the nearby ship is proudly filling its sails as it prepares to move away from the about-to-be-drowned boy, its crew oblivious to the splash, the thrashing legs, the fluttering feathers marking his descent.

You won’t find this painting in the National Gallery in Washington; rather, it’s in the Musees royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Belgium. Which is where, presumably, W.H. Auden saw it and was inspired to write this (reprinted in today’s issue of The Writer’s Almanac):

Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window
or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life
and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’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.

You don’t have to be a cynic to get the message of the painting or the poem; you just have to think a little. Everybody’s in his own little world, they both say, even when miracles are occurring in the world around him. And not just tragic miracles, “a boy falling out of the sky,” but wonderful ones as well: the last thing which many a spoiled child has wished for is a brother or sister; the spurned lover at his plow recognizes only the dark of night, not the burst of sunlight over the horizon; the shepherd with a grain of dust in his eye looks up and away from the dog at his feet, the flock well-tended. It’s a wonderful world around us, and sometimes a wonderfully painful one for other people around us. We just need to look around, see those worlds, turn away from what’s inside us, just long enough to touch and be touched by them.

(Perceptive essays about the poem and about the painting itself appear in many places around the Web. I particularly like Amardeep Singh’s blog post about it, as well as Alexander Nemerov’s essay “The Flight of Form” (in the University of Chicago’s Journal of Creative Inquiry, Volume 34, No. 4), to which Singh’s post links.)