This Painting Is Hiding A Wild Secret

Did you see that? Nope. I could have sworn I saw it. Do you hear something? Got one. What was that? This piece is called Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, attributed to Peter Bruegel the Elder. At first glance, you might think you're looking at a peaceful, coastal scene capturing the everyday life of rural folk. But if you look a little closer, you'll notice that nothing is as it seems. We're given a bird's eye view of a vast pastoral landscape by the sea. Our eyes are immediately drawn to a farmer plowing the land with his horse along a mountain. The cap on his head and downward-focused gaze hides much of his face from view. His red, puffy sleeves really pop against the blue-green ocean in the background. Lower down, we see a shepherd with a flock of sheep and his dog companion. He leans on his staff as he gazes up at the sky. And further down the slope, a fisherman is perched by the water, hunched over with his fishing rod extended. The whole scene feels very light and airy. The sea is dotted with cargo ships, and snowy mountains line the distant horizon. If we look closely, there's even a little town nestled along the coast with what seems to be a harbor for boats. The sun is setting. Birds are singing. An escaped fugitive named Icarus is drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. Wait, what? I think I got a little ahead of myself. Let's back up a bit. Who is Icarus? Why is he splashing around in the sea? And why does he seem like an afterthought when he's supposed to be the main focus of the painting? To fully understand this painting, we need to know Icarus. And to do that, we've got to go way back to mythological Ancient Greece. Icarus' story begins, as all great stories do, with cold-blooded murder. Long before Icarus was even born, his father, Daedalus, was a well-known inventor and craftsman in Athens. Things were great until Daedalus' nephew, Talos, came to apprentice with him. Talos turned out to be a really good inventor. Maybe a little too good. And Daedalus' ego just couldn't handle it. You know what they say, jealousy can make people do crazy things. So, naturally, Daedalus tried to kill his nephew by pushing him off the Acropolis. But the goddess Athena saw Talos falling and turned him into a partridge to save his life. Daedalus had gone from being a genius inventor to an attempted murderer. Which wasn't great for his reputation. So, he was exiled from Athens and ended up living on the island of Crete, working for King Minos. You might be thinking that this story is already a little weird, but buckle up. Because things are about to get twisted. King Minos' wife, Pasiphae, was cursed by the god Poseidon to fall in love with the king's prized bull. Desperate, she asked Daedalus to help her seduce the bull. And he agreed. So, Daedalus got to work building a hollow wooden cow that Pasiphae could climb into to trick the bull. And it worked. She ended up giving birth to a half-bull, half-human creature called a Minotaur. When the king found out, he was furious. I mean, yeah, that's creepy as f**k. He imprisoned Daedalus and his son Icarus on top of the tallest tower on Crete. This structure gives us an idea of what the tower would have looked like. Daedalus soon realized that the only way to escape prison was to fly. So he built wings for himself and Icarus out of feathers and wax. As he strapped them on his son, he warned him to not fly too low, or the ocean would dampen his wings. And also not fly too high, or the sun would melt the wax. Once in the air, Daedalus stuck to the middle path. But Icarus got carried away. Feeling invincible, he flew higher and higher until the wax began to melt. Daedalus could only watch as his son plummeted to his death. But Bruegel offers us his own unique twist on the myth. After the Fall Ovid's Metamorphosis is the earliest known written version of the Icarus myth. And it's pretty clear that Bruegel drew inspiration from it when creating this painting. Ovid writes, Some angler catching fish with a quivering rod, or a shepherd leaning on his crook, or a plowman resting on the handles of his plow, saw them, perhaps, and stood there amazed, believing them to be gods able to travel the sky. But in Bruegel's painting, nobody seems amazed at all. In fact, they look like they couldn't care less about that drowning son of a f***ing inventor. Ovid goes on, As Daedalus was consigning his unfortunate son to the grave, a noisy partridge poked its head out from a muddy ditch and called, cackling joyfully, with whirring wings. Sure enough, before Icarus is a partridge perched on a branch. But instead of attending the burial as Ovid describes, Bruegel shows the partridge casually watching as Icarus drowns, amused by his misfortune. This is meant to be Daedalus's nephew, the one he tried to kill. Now he's a partridge and he stays close to the ground because he's developed a fear of heights from being thrown off the Acropolis. To the left of the painting, there's a man hidden in the bushes, lying down. We can only really see the top of his head, and he looks like he's dead. This is often seen as a nod to the Flemish proverb, No plow will stop for a dying man. What's interesting is when the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium used infrared light on the painting, they discovered that under the layers of paint, the original sketch was actually of a man defecating, something that was somewhat of a theme in Bruegel's paintings. Like the medieval version of Where's Waldo. Bruegel earned the nickname, Peasant Bruegel, because he loved to depict scenes from peasant life. His paintings often included messages from common Netherlandish proverbs, which let him sneak in commentary on the foolishness, greed, and moral shortcomings he saw in society. He was known for these hidden messages, so it's not really a surprise that some art historians have speculated that the farmer in this painting isn't really a farmer at all. There are a few reasons for this. It's pointed out that his clothes are a bit too fancy for a regular farmer. He also looks distracted, and if you look closely, one of his feet is stepping on the plowed land, which apparently is something a skilled farmer would never do. Some think that this farmer might actually be King Philip II of Spain. At the time, King Philip II ruled over the Netherlands, and he wasn't exactly popular. The Flemish people saw him as an outsider who really didn't care about their needs. He used violence to enforce Catholicism and persecute Protestants, all while taxing the people heavily to fund his wars across Europe, wars the Flemish people wanted nothing to do with. According to this theory, the farmer isn't really looking at his work. He's glancing toward the dagger and wallet on the ground beside him. The dagger represents war, and the wallet symbolizes money. So in this reading, King Philip is ignoring the suffering around him, as he was known to do, and instead he's focused on maintaining his power and wealth. This is definitely a fringe interpretation, but it wouldn't be totally out of character for Bruegel, who had a reputation for being a bit of a troll. The interesting thing about this painting is how everyone seems to completely ignore the horror happening right in front of them. Someone just fell out of the sky, but even that's not enough to pull them away from their rote tasks. Just moments ago, Icarus was soaring like a god high above the earth, and now he's reduced to nothing more than a tiny pair of legs splashing in the water. If you didn't know the title of the painting, you might not even realize it's about Icarus at all. You could easily walk right by it without even noticing his plight, just like the oblivious characters in the painting. Bruegel communicates so eloquently through paint that no matter what someone is going through, even if they're the most important person in the world, life goes on. Even the main character is only a small blip in the bigger picture, a message that somehow feels both strangely comforting and incredibly unsettling at the same time. I guess the silver lining is, most of us don't have a partridge rooting for our demise. The only person who looks phased at all is this guy, and he's looking in the polar opposite direction of Icarus. But what is he looking at? This is Daedalus, Icarus's father. And this is another version of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. While it's often considered a less technically impressive version, in some ways it makes more sense. For example, the shepherd is looking up at Daedalus soaring across the sky instead of staring at nothing. And in this version, the sun is still high in the sky, whereas in the other, it's already setting. Which makes you wonder, how could Icarus's wings have melted from a sun that's already going down? Maybe he flew so high it took him that long to fall back to earth. Seems pretty unlikely though. This version was discovered in 1935, and the general consensus is that it's a copy of Bruegel's original by an unknown artist. But here's the kicker. This one might be a copy too. Let me explain. This version of the painting wasn't discovered until 1912, and the same year it was acquired by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. It's pretty unusual for a work by such a famous artist to go undocumented for so long, which is one of the reasons people have questioned its authenticity. Critics have also pointed out that the brushwork and details seem less meticulous compared to Bruegel's other pieces, though the overpainting that's been done over the years makes it harder to tell. This painting was also done in oil, while Bruegel was mostly known for using tempura. All of this has led to the theory that this might actually be a high-quality copy of a lost original by Bruegel, possibly even done by one of his children, who were known to imitate his work. According to the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, it's doubtful the execution is by Bruegel the Elder, but the composition can be said with certainty to be his. They currently display it with a question mark next to his name. So, is this a peaceful seascape, or a tragic death scene? Is this just a farmer, or is it King Philip II? Is this an original Bruegel, or isn't it? Is Icarus a reckless fool, or does he simply have an unmatched zest for life? I think 19th century poet Théophile Gautier may have been onto something when he said, To fall from the sky, one must climb there, even for but a moment, and this is more beautiful than to spend one's whole life crawling on the earth. Thank you Icarus, thank you Peter Bruegel the Elder, or whoever made this painting, and thank you to my amazing channel members. I'll see you in the next one.