Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
1555 · Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels
Two pale legs disappear into the sea in the corner while the ploughman keeps ploughing. Auden wrote a poem about exactly that indifference.
★ 7.1
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1550s
1550 – 1559
Showing 6 artworks from the 1550s
Netherlandish Proverbs
1559 · Gemaldegalerie, Berlin
A man bangs his head on a brick wall, another casts roses before swine, and over a hundred proverbs are acted out literally in one village.
★ 7.1
Venus and Adonis
1553 · El Prado, Madrid
Venus twists round to hold him back and he pulls away toward the hunt that will kill him. Cupid sleeps in the shade, useless.
★ 7.0
The Deposition (Michelangelo)
1553 · Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Florence), Florence
Michelangelo carved it for his own tomb, gave Nicodemus his own face, then took a hammer to it and broke off Christ's leg.
★ 6.9
Danae
1554 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Zeus arrives as a shower of gold and the old nurse scrambles to catch the coins in her apron while Danae simply reclines.
★ 6.9
The Parable of the Sower
1557 · Timken Museum of Art, San Diego
You take in the whole river valley before you notice the sower at the bottom corner, or Christ preaching from a boat behind him.
★ 5.2