Icarus’s body looks dainty as if he were never meant to fly. The setting of the scene is the sea and not the sky. In Célestin Nanteuil’s depiction, and perhaps many like it, Icarus is a stretched-out angel, his body perfect and unscathed, but his wings are broken. Daedalus is drawn into the image, placed visibly far way, and the shape of his body shows that he remains in flight, while his son, too brazen, will be banished by the sun’s blazing glory. But there is a clue to the tragedy of the tale. We can almost imagine Icarus is victorious in his flight. We see Sisyphus at the top, almost there, almost victorious, and we freeze the frame. Yet looking closely at the details of the engraving, the viewer sees Icarus forever fixed in this position, as if he is similar to Sisyphus who rolls the rock to the mountaintop only for it to fall back down again. His rage is palpable - directed towards the sun as if the sun is a villain. His body is massive, too much weight to bear in the air. This Icarus looks up at the sun, his hair blown wild, and his face a contorted mix of rage and regret. Goltzius’s Icarus depicts a monstrous-looking body plummeting to its death (which the viewer witnesses in a neat trick of visual toe-on perspective). It’s the part of the story most mentioned and memorialized in commentary and in art.Īt the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, one can see Hendrick Goltzius’s engraving of the tale (from an ignominiously titled series “The Four Disgracers”). It’s not spoiling it to say that Icarus dies at the end. Ovid and Apollodorus are the writers we have to thank for not allowing the tale to extinguish into non-existence. It’s a cautionary tale that originates from the Grecian isle of Crete in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. The story of Daedalus and Icarus is one such story.
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