In Brussels, the Oldmasters Museum specializes in early Netherlandish works by the likes of Robert Campin, Hieronymus Bosch, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Shortly before the Nazis invaded this Capital of Europe, W. H. Auden stayed for a spell, during which he visited the collection regularly, attracted in particular to Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, about which he penned his brief and, in my opinion, finest verse.
“Musée des Beaux Arts” offers a porous series of laminations, not of solely one painting, or the gallery in which it hung, or even the grand comic city, but of suffering at large: “Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”
Icarus is cherished for its breakthrough in perspective. Before, too many Flemish scenes failed to represent the world as we observe it. The visual plane almost flat. Topographies distorted. A childlike awkwardness set across the horizon. The human eye so divine, so sophisticated and subtle, that the distance of surrounding objects and elevations is overcorrected more rapidly than one can parse their relation to the visual field. That truly seeing took genius, and so much time, remains unnerving.
Auden miraculously delineates this leap. The onslaught of interpretation, through the constant catastrophe of living. It’s always being revised. It’s always focused and refocused behind our conscious experience.
Interestingly enough, as he took in Bruegel’s masterpiece, tragedy was boiling across Europe. By the time his poem was published, the city of Brussels belonged to Hitler. Auden had escaped to America, and carnage would become only more rife and hackneyed to boot.
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.
This legacy of suffering moved with Auden. It endures America too.
-David Fishkind