Fall of icarus


 " no plough stops for the dying man "

A parable on human aspiration. Daedalus and his son, Icarus, were imprisoned on the island of Crete. Daedalus created wings to fly away. Icarus, ambitiously, flew too near the sun. The wax holding his wings together melted and he plunged into the sea and was drowned.

If you look carefully, you can see his legs as he drowns, in the far distance of the painting. They are dwarfed by the horse’s rump …
Earth abides: the ploughman ploughs. Trading vessels go about their commercial business. Life goes on. The death of an unlucky aviator is of no more importance than the fall of a sparrow. Mankind deludes itself if it thinks otherwise.

Icarus’s end is deliberately not the central focus of the painting. You have to peer very closely to see the drowning man. You might miss him entirely, without the title to alert you. The eye is drawn instead to the glittering cities and smart ships in the distance. As if to emphasise the point, the ploughman at the centre of the painting references a popular proverb: ‘No plough stops for the dying man.’

This neglect of Icarus’s tragedy is, at one level, terrifying and sad. We read into it how little the world cares about our own pains. And yet, from another perspective, this neglect is deeply gratifying and importantly redemptive.

It is one of the central sources of our unhappiness that we spend so much of our lives fearing for our reputations and wondering what others will think of us when we fail – as we inevitably will at points. The slightest change in our image in the eyes of others can obsess us. We lie awake at night wondering how we could cope without the approval of people we don’t even like very much. We surrender our freedom to the verdicts of strangers.

Fall of icarus

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a reason not to worry what others think

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Christine Ayoub, guide aux Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique

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But the painter’s stroke of consoling genius is, here, to show us how, when we really mess up, almost no one will be looking or caring very much. The farmer is too busy ploughing, the shepherd is too taken up with thinking about the weather, someone else is overwhelmingly intent on fishing. Our tragedies don’t occupy society the way we fear they will. A few people might notice for a moment, then swiftly move on to the next thing. We are at the centre of the galaxy only in our own minds.