The complexities and varieties of ekphrastic responses to artworks can be demonstrated by looking at just some of the (vast body of) poetry that has been written about the paintings of Pieter Breughel the Elder. In a fascinating book titled Breugel’s Peasants: Art and Audience in the Northern Renaissance (1994), Margaret Sullivan points out that “Breughel has the ability to fascinate new generations ..(and)…each new generation develops a relationship to the works of art that is to some degree highly idiosyncratic” . This blog entry and the next two entries will look at responses to three of Brueghel’s paintings: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, The Corn Harvest, and Hunters in the Snow, as each of these use striking ways to represent Brueghel’s paintings.
So why is Brueghel so ‘fascinating’ to poets and what is it about this artist and his work that generates so many ‘idiosyncratic’ responses? For starters, it most likely has something to do with the mysteries surrounding Brueghel himself (and these, in turn, inform the ways in which we might read his paintings). It is interesting to note that Breughel was often misrepresented as a ‘peasant artist’. According to his earliest biographer, Karel van Mander (SchilderBoeck, 1604): ”in a wonderful manner Nature found and seized the man who in his turn was destined to seize her magnificently, when in an obscure village in Brabant she chose from among the peasants, as the delineator of peasants, the witty and gifted Pieter Brueghel” . This account helped establish a one-sided view of Brueghel, but more recent studies downplay his peasant background and emphasise instead his association with an elite group of scholars. Sullivan points out that, far from being a simple peasant Breughel was the peer of the humanist intelligentsia, a group subscribing to the ideological teachings of Erasmus which stressed the importance of the pursuit of self-knowledge, submission to reason rather than passion and the possession of a sanity which lets ‘reason gaze on honest things’. While the artists and writers of this group portrayed themselves as sober and hardworking, the peasants were depicted as base creatures who indulged their passions by ‘wallowing like animals in the midst of their vile instincts …. uncontrolled by reason or piety, wasting their resources on drinking and dancing.” Any poetic interpretation of Breughel’s peasant’s paintings, then, could be informed by this take on his social and intellectual affiliations. Where acceptance of the peasant theory would imply that Breughel’s depictions of peasant life should be read as unbiased chronicles, the second theory would suggest that the paintings be read ironically, the peasants depicted as caricatures of themselves. Arriving at a kind of ‘truth’ about Brueghel is not easy, as Fritz Grossman (Breughel: The Complete Edition of the Paintings, 1973), has pointed out:
“The interpretation of Breughel, the man and the work, from his day to ours presents a bewildering spectacle. The man has been thought to have been a peasant and a townsman, an orthodox Catholic and Libertine, a humanist, a laughing and a pessimist philosopher; the artist appeared as a follower of Bosch and a continuator of the Flemish tradition, the last of the Primitives, a Mannerist in contact with Italian art, an illustrator, a genre painter, a landscape artist, a realist, a painter consciously transforming reality and adapting it to his formal ideal – to sum up just a few opinions expressed by various observers in the course of four hundred years. With the exception of the peasant, whom I think that we can decently bury, each of these views, even when apparently contradicted by another, contains some part of the truth.”
So much for the complexities surrounding the artist – and there are many. Now let’s have a look at the same kinds of complexities surrounding his Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a painting so intriguing that it has generated well over 75 documented poems (according to G. Kranz, Das Bildgedicht, 1982).
Pieter Brueghel, The Fall of Icarus
Oil-tempera, 29 inches x 44 inches. Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.
The painting is based on Ovid’s ‘Fall of Icarus’ – the myth of the boy who escapes imprisonment by using the wings made by his father, Daedalus. In his youthful exuberance, he ignores his father’s warning and flies too close to the sun, whereupon the sun melts the wings and the boy plunges to his death. The striking aspect of this painting is that the only ‘depiction’ of the Icarus event itself is the small ‘detail’ of the tiny white legs disappearing beneath the water and (if you look closely), a white hand stretching upwards. In contrast, Breughel foregrounds a peasant plowing his fields, and directly behind is a merchant ship returning to harbour; below we see a shepherd and a fisherman, both looking in some other direction. No wonder that Icarus’s fall is depicted in the painting as just a minute incident; we are already alerted to this in the title itself: ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’. Icarus is just one more detail in the overall picture of a seemingly generic landscape painting, populated with peasants, fishermen, merchant ships going about their daily business.
Note: (For a better, more detailed image, see Google Culture: https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/exhibit/MgIyXpmuNdcLJg)
There are two versions of this painting but both have been shown to be copies of the lost original. Many questions still surround it and its attribution. There are also many elements in the painting that are puzzling and raise interesting questions about intention of the artist (which links back to the mysteries surrounding Brueghel himself)!
An excellent discussion of the various levels of meaning of this painting – and its mysteries – can be found in Journal of Art in Society : http://www.artinsociety.com/bruegels-icarus-and-the-perils-of-flight.html) This article can be seen as a companion piece to this blog entry, as it eloquently attempts to untangle the significance of many images in the painting. The concluding remarks in the article emphasise the many uncertainties surrounding this painting:
“[t]he idyllic, peaceful-looking setting turns out to be a stage for death, pride, ambition, suffering and retribution. The bird-like, god-like Icarus meets a fate which is all too human. An insignificant-looking partridge turns out to be a metamorphosed human who acts an instrument of retribution. Daedalus is either present or perhaps he isn’t. The ploughman is either a callous bystander, a noble peasant or a rapacious ruler. The sun is supposed to be either up or down. An innocent-looking furrowed field turns out to have an abandoned corpse lying on its edge (and maybe it’s something else entirely). A shepherd looks upward, but there is nothing to see (or is there?) A painting that is supposed to depict a fall shows only its termination. A dagger lies on the ground, but why? And we’re still not even sure that the painting is really by Bruegel.”
As you can see, writing in response to any of Brueghel’s paintings comes with its array of challenges! Let’s have a look at two of the best-known ekphrastic poems about Landscape with the Fall of Icarus: W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” and William Carlos Williams’ “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”.
W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”
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 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.
First of all, it is important to understand that Auden wrote this poem in 1939, in the wake of World War II and its particular parade of cruelties. Indifference to human suffering is a key factor informing this ekphrastic response to the painting. It’s not about Icarus per se, but from its very title, we see that the subject is ostensibly the museum itself and its display of cruel Renaissance paintings, many of which depict biblical atrocities. We are not invited to reflect on Icarus, but are immediately drawn into the museum itself in the first lines: one has the feeling of walking along with the poet, viewing these paintings, until we come upon the Brueghel, who serving as an example of one of the ‘old Masters’.
There are many good literary analyses of Auden’s “Musée” and Williams “Landscape” and I won’t go into a lengthy explication here, although it’s always tempting. My focus is directed to how these work ekphrastically. First of all, Auden’s poem takes the rhetorical perspective as defined by Kranz* (viewer of a painting talking to another viewer): the speaker does not simply comment on the painting(s), but is meditative about their wider significance. This poem also offers an excellent example of ‘spatial contextual ekphrasis’ as defined by Lund : we are invited to interpret the painting in relationship to its physical context: a space in which similar paintings are displayed. There are also two instances of ‘temporal contextual ekphrasis’, as I see it. First of all, by mentioning the ‘Old Masters’ and including Breughel in their company, we are reminded of the time in which this painting was executed and its connection to Northern Renaissance topics in general. Secondly, the mention of ‘children skating on a pond’ in the first stanza is yet another example contextual ekphrasis, in that it is a possible allusion to another work by Brueghel, The Hunters in the Snow, and therefore considers this painting in the wider context of Brueghel’s oeuvre painted over a period of time. (See the Perspectives I for further explanation of these two types of contextual ekphrasis).
In the next stanza, to which Auden gives only 8 lines, the focus is directly on the Brueghel painting itself, a little aside, ‘for instance’ – as if he and his companion are just now standing in front of the painting. Some details of the painting are described, but the important images for Auden are the human figures going about their lives; they are not cruelly avoiding suffering, but are simply not noticing anything around them, ‘something amazing’.
As we will see, Auden’s response to the painting is quite different from that of William Carlos Williams’.
William Carlos Williams, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
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
Quite different from Auden’s response, this poem immediately engages its object by naming Brueghel’s painting immediately in the title. The poem then goes on to refer directly to Breughel and his interpretation of The Fall of Icarus (‘according to …’). and then focusses in on the central image of the painting – the farmer ploughing his field and the white feet. But Williams places these in context of spring by giving the reader a view of the entire canvas: the ‘whole pageantry of the year’. Placing these elements first in the poem shows that the context of spring and the peopled landscape are (seemingly) more important than ‘Icarus drowning’, which is placed last. By ordering the elements of the poem in this way, Williams is following Breughel’s ordering in the painting: the Farmer is central and foregrounded, then the eye is drawn to the overall picture, then to the detail of the feet – but avoiding the other images – perhaps because they are redundant to the central message already present in the image of the farmer: the ‘insignificance’ of suffering to an unseeing world.
Williams has adapted the poem to fit his own poetic ideas: that language must be simple, direct, sharp, matter-of-fact. This fall into the basic tenets of objectivist and imagist poetics that were key to Williams’ poetry: the poem should be treated as an object and should look clearly at the world. He also had no regard for symbolism and the use of metaphor (which he described as ‘little glass balls’ that unnecessarily decorate words). He was also continually experimenting with new techniques of meter and lineation and used unusual line cut to bring focus directly to different aspects of an object (as cubism tried to do) and his subject matter was always centered on the everyday lives of common people.
It is clear from our look at just these two responses to Landscape with the Fall of Icarus that ekphrasis involves so much more than a simple description of a painting. Events of a certain time and place, for example, are key to Auden’s interpretation of the painting and poetic concerns were key to Williams’. These are just two of the 75+ poems on this painting and certainly every poet has had a unique and personal approach it. These are the ‘idiosyncratic’ responses that Fergusson is referring to (as mentioned in my introduction) and why the exploration of such poetic responses to paintings is such a rewarding adventure!
Next Entry: “Perspectives II (cont): Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow”