Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Icarius.
The gallery
The Fall of Icarus
Jacob Peter Gowy, 1635–1637
Painted for Philip IV's Torre de la Parada after a design by Peter Paul Rubens, this Baroque canvas captures the catastrophic instant of the myth: Icarus, his wax wings disintegrating in a scatter of loosened feathers, plummets headlong through the air while his father Daedalus, still aloft, twists back in helpless alarm. Gowy contrasts the two figures—the steady, horizontal flight of the father against the tumbling diagonal of the doomed son—to dramatize the boy's fatal disregard of paternal warning. The work hangs in the Museo del Prado, Madrid.
The Lament for Icarus
Herbert James Draper, 1898
A celebrated late-Victorian academic painting, awarded a medal at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, depicting the aftermath rather than the fall. The lifeless, sun-bronzed body of Icarus lies cradled against the rocks, his great russet-and-gold wings still attached, while three mourning nymphs gather around him in the fading light. Draper transforms the cautionary tale into an elegy on doomed aspiration and beauty. The painting is held by Tate Britain, London.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
After Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1558
One of the most famous and enigmatic treatments of the myth, this panel relegates the tragedy to a near-invisible detail: a ploughman, a shepherd, and an angler go about their work in a sweeping Mediterranean landscape, while in the lower right corner only Icarus's flailing legs break the surface of the sea, unnoticed by all. The composition became an emblem of human indifference to others' suffering, immortalized in W. H. Auden's poem 'Musée des Beaux Arts'. The work is preserved in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels.
The Sun, or The Fall of Icarus
Merry-Joseph Blondel, 1819
A monumental ceiling painting commissioned for the Rotunda of Apollo in the Louvre, allegorizing the sun through the myth of Icarus. Blondel renders the youth tumbling backward through a brilliant solar blaze, his wings coming apart as he is overwhelmed by the very light he sought to reach. Conceived in the grand Neoclassical decorative tradition, the work casts the fall as a meditation on hubris and the limits of mortal ambition. It remains in situ in the Musée du Louvre, Paris.