The Fall of Icarus Pieter Brueghel the Elder was born in 1564 in Brussels, Flanders. Some websites suggest that he was born in 1565. The art style he was part of is today called Dutch and Flemish Renaissance, also known as Northern Renaissance. Some of his most famous artworks or paintings are “The Whitsun Bride”, “A Village Lawyer”, “2 Peasants binding faggots”, and “The Tower of Babel”. He mostly painted landscapes and grotesque imagery, for example fire. He also painted very subtle details. He used very much detail in his paintings. He reproduced many of his father’s paintings with small changes. This essay will be about another very famous painting from Pieter Brueghel the Elder, called “The Fall of Icarus”. Icarus and his father Daedalus lived in Athens. Daedalus was very smart, and therefor, he was a famous craftsman and inventor. After training his nephew to be an inventor, he got so jealous that his nephew was a lot better than him, that he killed his nephew. In return for that, he was banned from Athens and had to flee to Crete with his son. There he had to build a labyrinth for the Minotaur. King Minos would not let Daedalus and Icarus leave, because they were the only ones who knew the way in and out of the labyrinth. Daedalus definitely wanted to escape from the island, so he invented wings for him and his son to …show more content…
You can only see his legs, and you have to know the myth of Daedalus and Icarus to understand the painting. I think that Icarus is painted very small because Pieter Brueghel the Elder wants people to concentrate on the tools and the other new things of the Renaissance. I think that the painting is very detailed, much like in the myth and also much in a new style from the Renaissance. I am also a bit surprised why Icarus is not in the front, but an ordinary ploughman who is just doing his