Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

A ploughman turns his furrow, a shepherd gazes at the sky, a fisherman bends to the water - and almost unnoticed in the corner, two pale legs vanish into the sea where Icarus has just fallen from the heavens. Bruegel buries the Greek tragedy in the margin of an ordinary working day, the great myth ignored by everyone in it; the world goes on ploughing while a boy drowns. Long credited to Bruegel and likely a copy after a lost original, it inspired W. H. Auden's poem on how suffering takes place 'while someone else is eating or opening a window.'