Art Ross - Student Choice 3, "The Fall of Icarus"

I have always enjoyed the painting "The Fall of Icarus" by Pieter Bruegel. The painting shows a bustling Greek landscape filled with people and things going about their normal lives. On top of a hill is a man tilling the ground, below him a shepherd tends to his flock, in the distance are cities presumably filled with people and busy ports with ships moving in and out of them, in the background the sun is setting...The landscape seems very normal until you look in the bottom-right corner of the painting and find a pair of legs fluttering in the sea amidst falling feathers - Icarus.

I've always like the painting for its interesting take on the Icarus myth - above all the painting says life always moves on. In the traditional Icarus myth we know that Icarus and Daedalus were hot commodities and prisoners in Crete. Daedalus, a master inventor, builds wings for them to escape, when they escape Daedalus cautions Icarus not to fly too close to the sun or the ocean. Icarus ignores his advice and flies too close to the sun, his wings melt and he falls to the sea and dies.

The genius of the painting is in the inattention it pays to Icarus. While he is an important character in Greek mythology and important in his story's universe, life continues to move without him. I think it is important for us to remember that our issues and problems are not always so extreme that the world will stop if we don't fix them the way we want to - life will move on.