Krispin Joseph PX
Do you know what Western painter Peter Brueghel usually disguised in his paintings? Most of Brueghel’s paintings are more ambiguous than his contemporaries. Drama is the most essential element in Brueghel’s paintings. Drama makes his compositions more mysterious.
Using these elements in his paintings, Peter Brueghel explores the intellectual up and down in Antewerp and the theatre culture. How does this theatre and Art blend in a canvas, and is the mannerist style used to hide something subtly also a matter?
In Greek mythology, Icarus was the son of the Great craftsman Daedalus, the architect of Crete’s labyrinth. When he escaped from King Mono’s prison, Daedalus warned Icarus. Icarus ignored his father’s warning against flying too close to the sun, melting his wing wax, and fell into the sea and died. His legs can be seen in the water just below the ship. The myth gave rise to the idiom, “Fly too close to the sun.”
Google Art and Culture gets insight into Brueghel’s painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. In this painting, Brueghel depicts the Greek mythical character Icarus falling into the water and dying. A farmer is the central character of this painting. He is doing his job in the field. Why that tragedy happens to Icarus is a mysterious question. However, what happened to Icarus is a solid clue for those who are adamant or become too ambitious and greedy.
Brueghel depicts the story of Icarus and the peasant people from a mundane perspective but narrates it on a grant physique. Icarus died while people were bound up in their lives and sweating in the same sun. A minor affair happened off the seaside—a splash that nobody witnessed- the sound of Icarus pounding the water and dying.
The event of the painting title is hidden somewhere in the canvas; Peter Brueghel depicts the natural life of a village. What Brueghel brings to this canvas is a monologue of the tragic incident of a ‘Great’ man and the expected life of an ordinary man is going well. Brueghel questions the norms and style of society. Why a common man in the central point of the painting and the title character fell into the water; Life goes on, and the apathy is both comic and pathetic.
We are living in a time of great people. Our life always divides into classes; rich, poor, and elite. Some of them are not even rich or elite; they are great people in the sense of stories and myths. Most of the ordinary people are living in the shadow of great people. In this painting, Brueghel questions this societal composition and this manner of practice visually.
