1. Visual analysis of painting: “landscape with the fall of Icarus” by Pieter breugel
Brent Baggaley

2. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is a painting in oil on canvas measuring 73.5 by 112 centimetres in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels. Wikipedia
Artist: Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Dimensions: 2′ 5″ x 3′ 8″
Subject: Icarus
Medium: Oil paint
Locations: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Musée des Beaux-Arts Tournai
Genres: Landscape painting, Visionary art

3. Genre: Historical Painting
Intended Audience: The audience is assumed to be familiar with the myth of the Fall of Icarus, from the Roman poet Ovid in his “Metaphophoses”
Creators: Text by Ovid; Painting by Pieter Brueghel
Rhetorical Purposes: to Describe and Illustrate the story and the landscape
To Persuade and Challenge the audience to think differently about this story

4. In his painting, breughel deliberately avoided foregrounding the figure of Icarus, as other painters such as Herbert draper and Jacob gowy had done.

5. Instead, Breughel deliberately reduced Icarus to a pair of flailing legs that disappear into the sea, as the rest of the world (the plowman, the ship, etc) go on with their own business.

6. This powerful painting has successfully communicated its idea theat the world often ignores individual tragedies.
In 1938, the English poet W.H. Auden wrote a poem that responded to this painting:
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;
In Breughel'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.

7. Works Cited page
Auden, W. H. “Musee des Beaux Arts.” New Writing, 1939.
Brueghel, Pieter. “Landscape with Fall of Icarus” ca. 1590–95, oil on wood (63 by 90 centimetres (25 in × 35 in), Museum van Buuren, Brussels, Belgium
Draper, Herbert. “The Lament for Icarus”
Gowy, Jacob Peter. “The Fall of Icarus” (1635-7), oil on canvas, 195 x 180 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid. Wikimedia Commons.
Ovid. “Metamorphoses” trans. Anthony Kline A.D.