Pompeii Wall Art

The painting above depicting the fall of Icarus was preserved on a wall in Pompeii--the artist is unknown, as is the date (but it was likely created sometime in the late first century BC or in the first century AD before 79, when Vesuvius erupted and the city was buried).

Lament for Icarus

Herbert James Draper, a late-Victorian British painter of the Pre-Raphaelite school (1863-1920), finished "The Lament for Icarus" in 1898.

Andrea Del Sarto's Icarus

Andrea Del Sarto, a Florentine Renaissance painter (born 1486, died 1531), created this work (date unknown).

Rubens' Icarus

"The Fall of Icarus," an oil on wood, was painted in 1636.

Mrs. Icarus

"Mrs. Icarus" is an amusing little verse by Carol Ann Duffy, the current British poet laureate (and the first woman to hold the post). It is from her 2001 collection The World's Wife:

I'm not the first or the last
to stand on a hillock
watching the man she married
prove to the world
he's a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock.

"Pillock," as one might easily gather from the above, is British slang for "idiot;" originally, it was a slang term for the penis, but that definition has fallen out of use.

Marc Chagall's Icarus

This 1975 oil painting is entitled "The Fall of Icarus."

Carlo Saraceni's Icarus Series

Carlo Saraceni, an Italian painter of the early Baroque period (born 1579, died 1620), painted a series of three works on copper in 1606-1607 depicting the Icarus myth. They are, from top to bottom, "Landscape With The Flight of Icarus," "Landscape With the Fall of Icarus," and "Landscape With the Burial of Icarus."

Matisse's Icarus

This paper cutout was included in Henri Matisse's famous 1947 book Jazz.

Anne Sexton on Icarus

Anne Sexton's poem To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph also takes up the Icarus myth:

Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wings on,
testing that strange little tug at his shoulder blade,
and think of that first flawless moment over the lawn
of the labyrinth. Think of the difference it made!
There below are the trees, as awkward as camels;
and here are the shocked starlings pumping past
and think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well.
Larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast
of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!
Feel the fire at his neck and see how casually
he glances up and is caught, wondrously tunneling
into that hot eye. Who cares that he fell back to the sea?
See him acclaiming the sun and come plunging down
while his sensible daddy goes straight into town.

Brueghel, Auden, and Williams on Icarus

Pieter Brueghel's 1558 painting Landscape With the Fall of Icarus (above--Icarus' legs can be seen entering the water in the lower right hand corner of the painting in front of the ship) is alluded to in poems by two major twentieth century poets, W.H. Auden and William Carlos Williams. Both take up the idea that tragedies, such as that of Icarus, occur simultaneously with the mundane events of daily life, and may in fact go unregarded by most.

Musee Des Beaux Arts W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel'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 on.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
William Carlos Williams

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning