Despite being alluded to in his title, ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’, Pieter Bruegel’s 1560 painting is not actually a painting about Icarus himself. Off to the corner of a vast seascape, two bare legs splash about by the shore. This is all we get of Icarus: a presence so microscopic it is almost negligible. A fine eye is required to spot the toy-sized figure of the drowning boy. Yet such a curious composition is entirely fitting with Bruegel’s period of creation. Nestled in the peak of the Renaissance, his painting embodies the movement of ‘rebirthing’ classical art, reworking the original tale by the Roman giant, Ovid, with a new spin. Bruegel uses his painting to render tradition insignificant. Here, the mythologised boy, who famously flew too close to the sun, is no longer the focus. Intrigue awakes with the displacement of what, or who, we expect to be at the artwork’s centre

“His bizarre presence should disrupt the everyday activities of the painting. Yet, nobody notices”

Instead, Bruegel re-orientates our perspective, distracting from Icarus’s singular disaster with the trivialities of life. What we perceive is a scene of pastoral indifference. A ploughman steadily toils in his labour, back hunched over his tool and foot lifted mid-step. The vivid red of his tunic sharpens our attention: amid a blurred scape of earthy tones, this unusual spot of saturation commands the eye to see him first. His horse trots downhill at a regular pace, docile to the whip of his master. In the background, ships traverse the sea, sails billowing in the wind. Even the sun remains anchored to its continual cycle, slowly setting on the horizon. Icarus is the only anomaly to the scene. His bizarre presence should disrupt the everyday activities of the painting. Yet, nobody notices. Not only do we, as viewers, desert Icarus as we hungrily consume the painting’s busy foreground, but so do the painting’s characters themselves. The ploughman’s gaze is downcast: he, like his horse, is blinkered by concentrated work on the soil. While his sheep graze downwards, a nearby farmer cranes his neck upwards, as if trying to spot what peculiar object has already fallen from the sky seconds before the fleeting scene which Bruegel has reproduced. Tugged by his rod, a lone fisherman misses the biggest catch: right before his eyes, Icarus’ squirming legs.

Suffering and struggle remain present in the painting whether we notice it or not. A dispiriting allegory to admit, but one which many great poets have taken away from this unique interpretation of the Icarus myth. W.H. Auden, in 1939, used ekphrasis to redraw Bruegel’s painting through the medium of words. The first detail he picks up on is “how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster”. Echoes to the crises of the Second World War arguably haunt Auden’s rendition of Icarus’s scene of ‘disaster’. For others – the ploughman, the fisherman, the farmer – “the splash, the forsaken cry” of Icarus’ disaster “was not an important failure”. Auden, as Bruegel once did, reminds again of the ease with which the crowd can ‘sail calmly along’, continuing forwards, while a singular Icarus sinks. William Carlos Williams put an imagist spin on the same subject in 1960, fracturing the landscape scene into condensed poetic pictures. But it is only in his poem’s final image that Icarus gets his full image: “a splash quite unnoticed / this was / Icarus drowning”.

“There is value to be found in a change of perspective. Bruegel’s viewer is able to find pleasure in the details which exist outside of Icarus’ fall”

Bruegel’s message, it seems, has become one of continual relevance throughout time, even applicable now to the 21st century student. In Cambridge’s fast-paced environment, I have found, one often embodies Bruegel’s version of Icarus: a tiny individual, head underwater and legs waving frantically in the air, swallowed by a vast sea. It can be difficult for personal struggles to feel seen in a landscape where academic trials consume the attention of all. As is the case in viewing Bruegel’s painting, the very challenge is being able to notice Icarus’s disaster in the first place. “No plough stops for a dying man” becomes our dismal motto as Week 5 blues encroaches. The well-known proverb which Bruegel was probably alluding to in his 16th century painting can be easily rephrased to fit the Cambridge experience: no university term stops for the struggling student.

Nevertheless, let not this be merely a dull study on the pains of the Cambridge term! A different, more optimistic, lesson can be learnt from Bruegel’s painting, I would argue. There is value to be found in a change of perspective. Bruegel’s viewer is able to find pleasure in the details which exist outside of Icarus’s fall. In Cambridge, perhaps one must move beyond the limited scope of academic disaster to see the bigger picture. The sheer relief of an unplanned pub trip, or the reliable distraction of a Wednesday Revs, is enough to break the illusion that the Cambridge vision stops at the narrowing sight of laptop screen. Perhaps, with a wider reach of the eyes, one finds there is life which exists outside of perpetual library imprisonment.