Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

c. 1600, after an original of c. 1560

Oil on canvas, 73.5 × 112 cm · Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

The design is Bruegel’s, but a 2011 technical study concluded this canvas is a copy by another hand, painted around 1600 after a lost original. It is still the best-known record of his composition.

Bought in 1912 as a copy; for decades some argued it was an original.
The underdrawing was judged weak and hesitant, a copyist’s work.
Look for Icarus’s legs in the water near the ship at lower right, while the ploughman works on.
Another version is in the Van Buuren Museum, Brussels.

Daedalus made wings of feathers and wax for himself and his son Icarus. Icarus flew too near the sun, the wax melted, and he fell into the sea.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain