Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is a painting in oil on canvas measuring 73.5 by 112 centimetres in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels. It was long thought to be by the leading painter of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Poem: Musée des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden

One of Bruegel's best
About suffering they
-known paintings, Landscape with the
were never wrong, The old
Fall of Icarus incorporates a land
Masters: how well they understood
-scape in the foreground with an
Its human position: how it takes place
expansive seascape stretching
While someone else is eating or opening
away towards the horizon.
a window or just walking dully along;
Closest to us, a farmer pushes
How, when the aged are reverently,
a plow and horse. To his right, on a
passionately waiting, For the
lower plateau of land, a shepherd
miraculous birth, there always must be
tends to his flock. In the right
Children who did not specially
foreground, a fisherman with his back
want it to happen, skating
to the viewer casts his net at the water's edge,
On a pond at the
while close to the shore in the bottom-right, two
edge of the wood:
legs kick in the air: a comically minute reference
They never forgot
to the titular narrative, which therefore seems to unfold in the background of the scene.

This is one of two paintings by Bruegel, which depict the story of Icarus as told in Ovid's Metamorphoses. These were the only two works which Bruegel created on mythological themes, in marked contrast to his contemporaries' focus on heroic narratives. The story revolves around the death of Icarus, the boy who wanted so badly to fly that he constructed wings out of wax and feathers. Failing to heed his father's warning not to fly too close to the sun, his wings melted and he plunged into the sea. We might expect that this tragic denouement would form the focal point of Bruegel's painting, but instead it becomes one incident woven into an all-encompassing representation of common
That
rural life, the demise of the hero rendered almost laughable in
even
its head-first ignominy. The composition is both irreverent
the dreadful
and subtly philosophically resonant, expressing a clear
dreadful
skepticism for the bombastic mythological painting that
must
had dominated the previous century
run its
of Renaissance art.

This work has
course
been the subject of much moral speculation, revolving
Anyhow
especially around the various figures who remain ignorant of
in a corner,
Icarus's plight, only the shepherd glancing up towards the sky,
some untidy spot
and not even towards relevant
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel'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.
spot. The displacement of Icarus from center-stage has been interpreted as a directive to remain focused on one's own daily life. William Dello Russo has even suggested that the painting may illustrate a well-known Netherlandish expression, "one does not stay the plow for one who is dying." Landscape with the Fall of Icarus was given its most famous twentieth-century treatment by the poet W.H. Auden, whose poem Musée des Beaux Arts (1938) considers how suffering and personal drama take place in a wider context of ongoing life.