Peasant Imagery and Bruegel's “Fall of Icarus”ROBERT BALDWIN

[published Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, LV, 3, 1986, 101-114]

Recent scholarship has explored a tradition of overwhelmingly negative peasant imagery from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries.1 Developed in medieval courtly circles and taken up in the Renaissance by the middle class, the peasant provided a negative definition of what was civilized and noble.2 Set against this background, Pieter Bruegel's peasant scenes display a curious ambiguity. On the one hand, his prints and paintings of peasant festivals express a bourgeois scorn for how “the peasants delight in such feasts, To dance, caper, and get bestially drunk”.3 Such scorn is clear on the face of the middle-class man who watches, with the jester and the real viewer, the drunken boors in the Vienna Peasant Dance. On the other hand, Bruegel's paintings of the Seasons and his Fall of Icarus celebrate peasant life for an industrious harmony with nature. This view of peasants is particularly clear in the Icarus where the sweeping panorama is anchored around the heroic figure of the plowman (Fig. 1).4 To date, no scholar has explored the Good Plowman theme and its importance in sixteenth-century Northern art.5 To do so will allow a more balanced understanding of Bruegel's peasants and a richer sens of the Icarus as a mythological image phrased in vernacular terms. As such, it parallels Northern humanists who called for translations of classical texts and the Bible. On a more social level, it implies a bourgeois distance from farmers by celebrating the peasant who stays in his place. In this sense, the painting may, on one level, dovetail with Bruegel's more satirical images of peasants.

1 Paul Vandenbroeck, “Verbeeck's peasant weddings: a study of iconography and social function,” Simiolus 1984, 79-124; Keith Moxey, “Sebald Beham's Church Anniversary Holidays,” Simiolus 1981-1982, 107-130; Hessel Miedema, “Realism and the Comic Mode: The Peasant,” Simiolus 1977, 205-219; G. G. Coulton, Medieval Village, Manor, and Monastery, Cambridge, Eng., 1925, New York 1960 Harper ed., 242-245, 400-401, 516-519.

2 Vandenbroeck, op. cit.

3This is the inscription on Bruegel's engraving, The Hokoken Kermisi, illus. in Louis Lebeer, Catologue raisonné des estampes de Bruegel l'ancien, Brussels 1969, 91. The pigs parading across the foreground of Bruegel's print are clearly metaphors for the swinish peasants, as they are in Brant's Ship of Fools: “For peasants drink and give offense ... Most every fool doth love the sow.” See the Ship of Fools, trans. E. H. Zeydel, New York 1944, 239, with criticisms of peasant excess during religious holidays on p. 307. For the same excess on holy days, see Coulton, op. cit., 245, 400. Farfetched is Margaret Carroll's claim in a 1985 C. A. A. paper that these prints use coarse peasants as nationalistic celebrations of the Flemish people.

4 For Bruegel's Icarus, see Carl Gustaf Stridbeck, Bruegelstudien, Stockholdm 1956, 235-242; Kenneth Lindsay and Bernard Huppé, “Meaning and Method in Bruegel's Painting,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 14, 1956, 376-386; and Philippe Roberts-Jones, Bruegel. La Chute d'Icare, Freiburg 1974. The picture's date is uncertain but is usually placed early, around 1555-60.

5 The good plowman theme is briefly discussed in Lindsay and Huppé., op. cit.

The husbandman was a familiar paragon of industry, moderation, and moral integrity, both in classical and early Christian writings. Virgils' Georgics, Horace's second Epode, Columella's On Agriculture and Pliny's Natural History-all well known to the Renaissance-used agricultural labor as the central metaphor in nostalgically describing a golden age in early republican Rome.6 Virgil's account offers intriguing parallels to Bruegel with its extensive description of the peaceful, moderate plowman ignorant of the bellicose, avaricious ambitions of city dwellers seeking “kingdoms doomed to fall”.7 Horace, Columella, and Pliny also contrasted a past, moral country life to the present immorality of cities. In the golden age, even urban life was guided by the virtues of rural existence. Thus Pliny wrote of Republican Rome. “The agricultural class produces the bravest men, the most gallant soldiers, and the citizens least given to evil designs.”8 The personification of Pliny's farmer-leader was Cato the Censor whose treatise on husbandry, De Agricultura, along with those by Varro, Paddadius, and Columella, were known to the middle ages and reprinted in Bruegel's time. An illustrated fifteenth-century French Cato glossatus shows Cato pointing out the importance of frequent plowing.9 Indeed, plowing summed up the labors of husbandry and was used thus for the title page of the first farming manual printed in the Renaissance, Fitzherbert's Boke of Husbandrye, 1523 (Fig. 2).10

The Roman tradition of pastoral romanticism and husbandry manuals mingled with Christian metaphor to spawn the later imagery of the good plowman. Important Scriptural sources were Isaiah 2:4 and Micah 4:3 with their swords beaten into plowshares. Other passages referred to God's husbandry and saw in the plowman diligence and hard-won salvation.11 Most important was Luke 9:62, “Jesus said to him: No man putting his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”12 Such texts and the extensive Christian commentaries on them underlay the late medieval and Northern Renaissance esteem for the humble but diligent plowman.13

Virtuous plowing found its most common expression in sixteenth-century Netherlandish art in allegories of Peace, Diligence, and Hope. The peaceful plowman, of course, developed from the prophecized beating of “swords into plowshares” and the fulfillment of this prophecy in

6 Virgil, Georgics, Bk. 2, lines 490-540, Loeb rev. ed., Cambridge 1978, 150-153. Also see bk. 1, lines 466-514 (Loeb ed., 112-115). Horace, Odes and Epodes, Loeb ed., Cambridge 1934, 364-369; Columella, On Agriculture, Loeb ed., Cambridge 1941, 3-27; Ovid, Fasti, IV. 405-410 (Loeb ed., 219); and Pliny, Natural History, bk. XVIII.iii-vi, Loeb ed., Cambridge 1950. V, 195, 201, 205.

7 See Patrica Johnston, Virgil's Agricultural Golden Age: A Study of the Georgics, Leiden 1980; L.P. Wilkinson, The Georgics of Virgil, Cambridge, Eng., 1969, 270-297; Maren-Sofie Rostvig, The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphosis of a Classical Ideal. Vol. I, 1600-1700, 2nd ed., Oslo 1962; William Sessions, “Spenser's Georgics,” English Literary Reniassance, 1980, 202-238. For a sixteenth-century Italian woodcut attributed to G. p. Salviati celebrating a classical plowman with oxen, see David Rosand and Michelangelo Muraro, Titian and the Venetian Woodcut, Washington, D.C., 1976, 172-173. For a plowman with oxen in the invocation woodcut for Sebastian Brant's 1502 edition of the Georgics, see Sandra Hindmann, ed., The Early Illustrated Book, Washington D.C., 225, fig. 8. Other Virgilian plowmen appear on p. 182, fig. 2; p. 186, fig. 6.

8 Pliny, op. cit., Loeb ed., V, 195.

9 For Roman husbandry in the middle ages, see G. E. Fussell, The Classical Tradition in European Farming, Cranbury 1972, 20-93. For the scene of Cato, see Otto Pächt and Dagmar Thoss, Französchiche Schule. Die illuminierten handschriften und Inkunabeln der Österreichischen nationalbibliothek, Vienna 1979, I, 22-23; II, fig. 15.

10 Fussell, op. cit., 21. The Booke of Husbandrye dates from the thirteenth century.

the Prince of Peace. Interwoven with this was a classical tradition of agricultural abundance and pastoral harmony as images of peace. Such a plowman labored in Heemskerck's engraved Allegory of Peace (1564) and in an engraved Allegory of War and Peace published by Pieter Baltens (1562) which featured the beating of swords into plowshares and contrasted the soldiers of death with the plowman of life.14 Presumably Bruegel meant to invoke such imagery when he painted a sheathed sword set aside from the plow in the lower left of his Icarus and placed a corpse in the bushes.15

Plowing as Diligence drew on the Biblical passages cited above and appeared among other places in Sebastian Brant and Erasmus.16 Invoking Luke 9:62, in a chapter from the Ship of Fools entitled “Of Persisting in the Good”, Brant wrote,

16 See also the Lucan plowman in Hugh Latimer, Selected Sermons of Hugh Latimer, ed. Allan D. Chester, Charlottesville 1968, 29. For diligent plowing, fishing, and shipping in another English sermon which parallels three of the four activities in Bruegel's Icarus, see J. W. Blench, Preaching in England in the Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, Oxford 1964, 124, 126.

11 I Cor. 3:6-9: “I have planted, Apollo watered, but God gave the increase ... every man shall receive his own reward according to his labor. For we are God's coadjutors; you are God's husbandry.”; Prov. 12:11: “He that tilleth the land shall be satisfied with bread; but he that pursueth idleness is very foolish”; Prov. 20:4: “Because of the cold the sluggard would not plow: he shall beg therefore in the summer, and it shall not be given to him”; Prov. 24:27: “Prepare thy work without, and diligently till the ground: that afterward thou mayst build thy house”. Such imagery was used by Wessel Gansfort to exemplify the free will needed for salvation. See Albert Hyma, The Christian Renaissance: A History of the Devotio Moderna, Hamden 1965, 256.

12 Lindsay and Huppé, op. cit., 383, briefly applied Luke 9:62 to Bruegel's Icarus.

13 Joe Horrell, “Chaucer's Symbolic Plowman,” Speculum, XIV, 1939, 82-92; Stephen Barney, “The Plowshare of the Tongue: The Progress of a Symbol from the Bible to 'Piers Plowman',” Medieval Studies, 35, 1973, 261-293; Edmund Reiss, “The Symbolic Plow and Plowman and the Wakefield 'Mactaacio Abel',” Studies in Iconography, 5, 1979, 3-19; M. Godden, “Plowman and Hermits in Langland's 'Piers Plowman',” Review of English Studies, 35, 1984, 129-163; R. Mohl, The Three Estates in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, New York 1933, 222, 234, 241; Fussell, op. cit. 78; Janet Coleman, Medieval Readers and Writers, 350-1400, Columbia 1981, 107. A fifteenth-century plowing Flemish saint appears in Gent Duizend Jaar Kunst en Cultuur, exh. cat., Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent 1975, 76-77. An engraving by Jan Sadeler after a Dirck Barendsz design of Mankind Before the Flood uses plowing as a virtuous contrast to the “shameful luxury” and sloth featured in the foreground. see J. Richard Judson, Dirck Barendsz, Leiden 1970, fig. 41, cat. 72. another diligent plowman is the prodigal son's older brother shown in three prints by or after Hans Sebald Beham. See The Illustrated Bartsch, XV, New York 1978, ed. Robert A. Koch, 52, 195, 196. For diligent plowing in Van Mander, Hoefnagel, and Jan de Lairesse, see E. De Jongh, “The artist's apprentice and Minerva's secret: an allegory of drawing by Jan de Lairesse,” Simiolus 1983, 209-210. Plowing symbolized Christian marriage and/or intercourse in Jan Sadeler I's Allegory of Love, (Hollstein, XXII, p. 148, fig. 491); in Brant, op, cit., 215; Jeffrey Henderson, The Maculate Muse, New Haven 1975, 46, 166; and in Jerome, The Letters of Jerome, trans. C. Mierow, Westminster 1963, 152, Letter 22.20).

14 Hollstein Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts VIII, p. 240, no. 135, from the series The Vicissitudes of Human Things. The print is based on a drawing from 1563, reproduced in Jan Garff, Tegninger af Maerten van Heemskerck, Copenhagen 1971, p. 70. Perhaps based on a design by Marten de Vos, the print published by Baltens is one of five allegorical scenes relating to Netherlandish politics around 1577. See Marie mauquoy-Hendrickx, Les estampes de Wierix, Brussels 1979-83, II, 295-298, esp. 298, pl. 225. Thanks to Stephen J. Kostyshyn for this information.

15 Stridbeck, op. cit., 238, also sees the sheathed sword as an emblem of peace.

Some use a sturdy hand to plowAnd first with zealousness they bowTo wisdom, for good works show willYet never reach the highest hillThat toward the realm of heaven's inclined;Alas, they often look behindAnd yearn for that Egyptian landWhere all their dreamed-of flesh pots stand.17

Illustrating this passage was a woodcut showing the would-be good plowman turned fool (Fig. 3). In the Enchiridion (1503), Erasmus also cited Luke in discussing the labor and good works needed for salvation.

The third point is to persevere in courses well begun. For that reason you must put stiffening in your weakness to keep from leaving the path of virtue ... you must ... neither waver nor halt nor turn aside nor having put your hand to the plow, look back, but rejoice like a giant at the course to be run ... until you receive the reward and crown promised to those who persevere.18

Luke's foolish plowman looking back also appeared in at least two sixteenth-century book illustrations. The first, a straightforward illustration, was Augustin Hirschvogel's engraving used in a typological handbook of 1550.19 The second was an emblem from Georgette de Montenay's Emblemes ou devises chrestiennes (Lyons, 1571), where the plowman worked in a more didactic context already developed by Brant and Erasmus (Fig. 4).20 The Latin motto quotes Luke 9:62, “non aptus est regno dei” (“not fit for the kingdom of God”). Following this didactic trend, the diligent plowman appeared in many Northern moralizing scenes. He worked, for example, in the right background of a mid sixteenth-century engraving attributed to Cornelis Bos entitled, Industry Rewarding Diligence and Punishing Indolence (Fig. 5). This print borrowed its foreground grouping from a lost painting by Siciolanted de Sermoneta, known only through later versions.21 Eliminating Siciolante's coastal background, Bos introduced a virtuous plowing, sowing, and harvesting behind Diligence, and a scene of thievery and capital punishment behind Indolence. As in Bruegel's Icarus, agricultural labor contrasts with death and hints at Christian overtones. God, after all, commanded Adam to till the soil. Though a punishment for sin, such labor was usually seen as a display of obedience. Thus John Gower complained in the fourteenth century of the many wicked and lazy plowman who ignored God's command. 22 In the fifteenth-century Flemish manuscript, sloth was personified by a sleeping plowman (Fig. 6).23 Although Adam was usually shown working with a shovel or branch, some artists such as Crispin van den Broeck gave him a plow, perhaps drawing on Luke's plowman to suggest a heavenly kingdom for those who labor.24

17 Brant, op. cit., 276-277. Brant's plowman also draws on a German idiom for folly irrelevant to Bruegel's painting: “Den Narrenpflug ziehen.” For this tradition which mocked unmarried women by making them pull plows at Shrove-tide, see William A. Coupe, The German Illustrated Broadsheet in the Seventeenth Century, Baden-Baden 1966, 176; and Max Geisberg, The German Single-Leaf Woodcut. 1500-1550. New York 1974, 1128, with a Protestant variation on P. 1088.

18 Erasmus, “Certain General Rules for the True Christian Life,” In The Enchiridion of Erasmus, trans. Raymond Himelick, Bloomington 1963, 84-85.

If diligence, good works, and obedience were qualities associated with plowing, hope was equally important, drawing of I Cor. 9-10: “he that ploweth should plow with hope”. Such a hopeful farmer figured in sixteenth-century Netherlandish engravings of Hope by Bruegel,25 Crispin van den Broeck (Fig. 7), and Goltzius.26 The main figure in Bruegel's Hope carried the traditional shovel and scythe, implements of husbandry that reinforced the centrality of the distant plowman to the print's meaning.27 In van den Broeck's woodcut, we note a cross on the plough, a reference perhaps to salvation through good works and to Romans 8:24: “For we are saved by hope.” Even more important was the patristic conflation of the plow and the cross because of the former's cross-like shape and wooden construction.28 It was but a simple step to see Christ (or God) as a good plowman, uprooting sin from souls with the plow-cross.29 In a similar way, the preacher became a plowman as well as a sower, uprooting and planting with God's word.30 In that Bruegel's plowman works alongside a big bag of seeds, he too is a sower and takes on that Biblical metaphor for good works as well.31

Beyond peace, diligence, and hope, plowing could also be used to symbolize prudence, as in the rear of Bruegel's engraving of that virtue.32 Like the dying man at the left who turns from his physician to confess to his priest, the plowman looks prudently to the kingdom of God.

Seen from this perspective, the plowman in Bruegel's Fall of Icarus takes on a richer, sharper contrast to Icarus than has previously been noted. If Icarus' flight towards the heavens results in a fatal plunge to the earth, the plowman's earthbound labors lead him to eternal life in heaven. This antithesis allows us to dismiss Auden's tempting analogy between Bruegel's Icarus and his religious works where secular figures ignore the sacred events unfolding around them. Presuming the Icarus depicts a tragedy ignored by a “blind”, self-absorbed world, this analogy misses Luke's idea that the virtuous plowman must stick to his work. Were he to “look back” and see the drowning Icarus, he would be “not fit for the kingdom of God”. If knowledge of the plowman's traditional iconography helps us see a positive side to his absorption, a closer look at the Icarian tradition strengthens this reading, extends the plowman's contrast with Icarus, and expands our understanding of the painting as a whole.

As scholars have noted, the Icarus borrowed its plowman, fisherman, shepherd, and partridge from Ovid's Metamorphoses.33 Despite a few tributes to Daedalus' skills, Ovid

19 Peter Pereny, vorredt und eingang der Concordantzen alt und news Testaments ..., Vienna 1550, 1.71; reproduced in The Illustrated Bartsch, VIII, ed. Jane S. Peters, New York 1982, 164-165.

20 Georgette de Montenay, Emblèmes ou devises chrestiennes Lyons 1571, 38.

21 Sune Schéle, Cornelis Bos, Stockholm 1965, 209-210. For a copy given to Cornelis van Cleve, see Max J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, New York 1972, Ixa, p. 129.

22 Vox Clamantis, V, ix, cited with other comments on plowing in Coleman, op. cit., 140, 148-149.

23 Brussels, Bibliothèeque Royale, ms. 11041, fol. 33v. The bad plowman also drew on Hosea 10:13, “you have plowed wickedness; you have reaped iniquity.”

24 Frontispiece, Biblia Sacra, Antwerp, 1583, reproduced in A. J. J. Delen Histoire de la gravure dans les anciens Pays-Bas et dans les provinces Belges, paris 1934, II, p. XXXVIII. A plowing Adam also appears in a seventh-century illumination reproduced in André Grabar, The Golden Age of Justinian, New York, 1967, 215, fig. 242; and a twelfth-century bronze relief on the doors to the west facade of San Zeno in Verona. For the Netherlandish plowing Abel, see Philip R. Berk, “Et Adam dilexit Abel: Jan Mostaert's 'First Family', Oud Holland 1982, 201-212.

interestingly gives him the lion's share of the blame, citing his rash attempt to “change Man's very nature”. Ovid also describes how the jealous Daedalus earlier murdered his apprentice nephew, throwing the boy down the steps of Minerva's temple and hiding the crime with a lie. The goddess saved the falling boy by turning him into a partridge who later exulted over the death of Icarus.34 Elsewhere, in his Trisitia, Ovid repeats his scorn for both father and son, “for both had false wings ... one ought to remain within one's place assigned by Fortune”.35 Like Ovid, Dio Chrysostom attacked Daedalus' presumption in striving for unnatural flight and saw Icarus's death as his punishment.36 Lucian, whose works were well known to the Renaissance, cited Icarus twice as an example of foolish ambition and pride.37 He was the only classical author to describe an Icarus “falling head first into deep waters”. Perhaps then he was the source for Bruegel's unprecedented choice of a drowning rather than falling Icarus, his head submerged beneath the sea.38 Also important were Seneca's tragedies Hercules Oetaeus and Oedipus, known in at least nineteen Latin editions by 1563.39 In both works, the myth served to warn the reader against ambition and excess. Particularly interesting is Seneca's nautical imagery, unique in ancient discussions of Icarus. Also intriguing is the passage from the Hercules where the common man exults in the fall of the mighty.

...nor does the poor man count himself full blest, unless the sees the blessed fallen from this height. Whoever has left the middle course fares never in path secure-...Daedalus, cleaving his path midway the heavens, reached peaceful shores andto no sea gave his name; but while young Icarus dared rival true birds in flight,looking down upon his father's wings and soared aloft close to the sun itself, to an unknown sea he gave his name ... Let another be noised abroad as blest and great; but let no throng hail me aspowerful. Let my frail craft keep close to shore-...misfortune passes by quiet ports and seeks for ships sailing the open seas.40

In the Oedipus, similar natical metaphors for moderation introduce the Icarian example.

Were it mine to shape fate at my will, I would trim my sails to gentle winds... May soft breezes, gently blowing, unvarying, carry my untroubled barque along; my life bear me on safely, running in middle course. While, in fear of the Cretan king, madly the lad sought the stars, in strangedevices trusting, and strove to vanquish true birds in flight ... 41

It seems likely Bruegel's prominently placed ship, heading for the harbor with its sails being prudently trimmed, drew either directly or indirectly on Seneca.

From Ovid, Dio, Lucian, and Seneca, the Icarian myth became a Medieval and Renaissance moral topos, showing the dangers of excess, political or philosophical ambition, pride, self-deception, and ignorance of natural orders in general. A Christian reading appeared in the popular Ovide moralisé where Daedalus represented God, and Icarus was likened to Adam and Eve, doomed to a mortal fall by his aspiration to divine knowledge.42 Through a positive Icarus symbolized the Neoplatonic poet, lover, or philosopher in Italian Renaissance literature, 43

41 Loeb ed., 241. Turner mistakenly cites Dante as the first poet to compare Icarus and Paeton, something Lucian had done.

the foolish, immoderate, and self-deceiving Icarus remained predominant in the more didactic realm of Renaissance emblems, Northern humanism, and sixteenth century Netherlandish art.44

Emblem books in Italy and the North generally used Icarus to illustrate immoderacy.45 If Bruegel's Icarus strayed like Ovid's figure “from the middle way”, he was presumably no less foolish than Daedalus, who rashly sought to “change man's very nature”; “both has false wings ... one ought to remain within one's place” (Ovid).46 Indeed, Bruegel stressed the folly of Icarus and Daedalus by placing Ovid's excited partridge near the drowning Icarus, a reminder of the father's own excess, envy, and murderous rage.47

Closer to Bruegel in spirit and date was Frans Hogenberg's engraving Al Hoy of 1559 (Fig. 8).48 Derived from Bosch's famous Haywain and drawing on Netherlandish metaphors of hay for folly and worldliness, Hogenberg detailed most of the cardinal vices, using a falling Icarus in the upper right for pride and self-deception. The nearby inscription reads, “Die te hooghe wilt vlieghen, Die sal sy selven bedrieghen” (“he who intends to fly too high, he shall deceive himself”). As this text implies, the self-deception of Icarus is remedied only by self-knowledge, by a sense of one's true limitations and proper place in the wider orders of society and nature. Moderation, in short, is inseparable from self-knowledge. Three more sixteenth-

45 Turner, op. cit., 27-46; Ashton, op. cit.; Inemie Gerards-Nelissen, “Otto van Veen's 'Emblemata Horatiana',” Simiolus 1971, 20-63, esp. 39-43, and n. 85; Green, op. cit., 288-291; Lowenthal, op. cit., 148-153; and Lindsay and Huppé, op. cit., 379, n. 7. For an Italian Renaissance illumination, see Jonathan Alexander, Renaissance Book Illumination, New York 1977, pl. 36.

46 Daedalus seems to have been originally present in the Brussels museum version of Bruegel's Icarus but was painted out later. Pentimenti of his figure are visible to me and this would explain the otherwise unintelligible upward gaze of the shepherd.

47 See n. 34 above for other examples of the partridge.

25 Lebeer, op. cit., 95.

26 For Goltzius's Specs, see Walter Strauss, Hendrik Goltzius: Complete Engravings, Etchings, and Woodcuts, New York 1977, I, 315, no. 184. Other plowmen of hope appear in a poem that accompanied Heinrich Vogtherr's woodcut, Allegory of Hope, of 1545, and two emblems from George Wither, See Ingmar Berström, “The Iconological Origins of 'Specs' by P. Bruegel the Elder,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 1956, 53-63; and George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne, London 1635, repr., Univesity of South Carolina 1975, 106, 144.

27 For husbandry imagery in hope, see Emile Mâle, L'art religieux de la fin du moyen âge, Paris 1949, 311; Rosemund Tuve, “Notes on the Virtues and Vices,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 1963, 264ff.

28 The iron and wooden plow also symbolized Christ's dual nature in patristic thought. See Jean Danielou, Primitive Christian Symbols, trans. D. Attwater, Baltimore 1964, 89-101.

29 Ibid., 96-99. For numerous medieval examples, see Barney, op. cit., 267-274, and E. Faye Wilson, “The 'Georgica Spiritualia' of John of Garland”, Speculum 1933, 363, 373-375. Seventeenth-century emblems on this theme include Winther, op. cit., 144, and Benedict van Haeften, Schola cordis, Antwerp 1629, reproduced in Daz Herz. Im Umkreis der Kunst, Biberach 1966, 71.

30 Numerous medieval sources are cited in Lindsay and Huppé, op. cit., 383; and Barney, op. cit., 267-274. Sixteenth-century examples include Calvin, Commentary on the Book of the Corinthians, trans. John Pringle, Edinburgh 1848, I, 126-128; and Latimer, op. cit., 28-49. The locus classicus for the rhetorician-plowman is Cicerco, Orator, 2.131.

century Flemish prints of unknown authorship repeated the falling Icarus as an example of pride and self-deception.49

Closer to Bruegel's painting was one of his seven engravings of ships (ca. 1565) in which the falling Icarus appeared (Fig. 9).50 Here a Christian reading of the myth seems primary. The monstrous fish and the tiny cross on the hill at upper left evoke death and salvation; only Christ's sacrifice can restore the fall of Adam-Icarus and save sea-tossed humanity from the jaws of hell. Such a reading is supported by the nautical imagery of Bruegel's engraved Last Judgement where doomed sinners plunge from a capsized boat into a hellish, fish mouth.51 In Bruegel's painted as well as engraved Icarus, death and damnation are the price for ambition and self-deception. Presumably this is why he abandoned iconographic tradition by painting Icarus 31 The bad, sleeping sower appears in our fig. 8 and in a drawing illustrated in J. Richard Judson, The Drawings of Jacob De Gheyn II, New York 1973, fig. 1a.

32 Lebeer, op. cit., 102.

33Ovid's witnessing shepherds and fisherman, though not his plowman, appear regularly in ancient art. See peter heinrich von Blanckenhagen, “Daedalus and Icarus on Pompeian Walls”, Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Institis. Römische Abteilung, 75, 1968, 106-43.

34 The cawing partridge appears in a woodcut illustrating the falling Icarus in a Venetian Metamorphoses of 1522, illustrated in Charles De Tolnay, Pierre Bruegel l'ancien, Brussels 1935, II, pl. 11; and in Carlo Saraceni's Burial of Icarus, illustrated in Stephen Polcari, “A Newly Found Drawing by Saraceni,” Burlington Magazine 1979, 307, fig. 42.

35 Tristia, III, 4 cited in John H. Turner, The Myth of Icarus in Spanish Renaissance Poetry, London 1973, 19.

36 Discourses, “Fourth Discourse on Kingship”, cited in Turner, op. cit., 14, Loeb ed., 225-227. Dante also attacked Daedalus and saw Icarus' death as punishment for the father's hubris. See Paradiso, VII, 125-126, cited in Turner, op. cit., 23-24.

37 Imagines, cited in Turner, op. cit., 14-15.

38 Imagines, Loeb ed., IV, 293. In Lucian's omnium seu Gallus, (Loeb ed., 219), Icarus also falls “head-first iinto the sea”. One should also note that Ovid in the Art of Love (Loeb ed., 72-73) and Metamorphosis (Loeb ed., 423), describes how Icarus' cries are “choked” and “drowned” by the sea.

39 Cited by Turner, op. cit., 20-21, Loeb ed., 239-241.

40 Loeb ed., 509. Also see Horace, Odes and Epodes, op, cit., 131.

42 Ovide moralisé, Wiesbaden, 1966, III, 147ff; cited in Turner, op. cit., 22. See also the texts in Lindsay and Huppé, op. cit., 382. For the patristic comparison of the falling Icarus and Lucifer, see George Galavaris, The Illustrations of the Liturgical Homilies of Gregory Nazianzenus, Princeton 1969, 131-132. For the Icarian pride of Gothic cathedrals, see Teresa Frisch, ed., Gothic Art, Englewood Cliffs 1971, 31-33. related themes of hubris include the Promethean theft of fire and the fall of Simon Magus. See Carlo Ginizburg, “High and Low: The Theme of Forbidden Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Past and Present 1976, 28-41; O. Raggio, “The Myth of Prometheus: Its Survival and Metamorphoses up to the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 1958, 44-62; Richard Kenneth Emmerson, Antichrist in the Middle Ages, Seattle 1982, 75-80; and Turner, op. cit., 23. Thanks to Craig Harbison for the Ginzburg reference.

43 Turner, op. cit., 15, 23-26, 47-152; R. P. Calcraft, “The Lover as Icarus: Góngora's 'Oue de invidiosos montes levantados' in Salvador Bacarisse, ed., What's Past is Prologue, Edinburgh 1984, 33-45. Robert Vivier, Frères du ciel, quelques aventures poétiques d'Icare et de Phaeton, Brussels 1962; Marc Eigeldinger, “Le Mythe d'Icare

drowning rather than falling. If the print used a cross to imply deliverance from the whale, the painting chose another familiar metaphor of salvation, the harbor-bound ship, also seen in Bruegel's Hope.52 Reinforcing the unusual emphasis on Icarus' death is the corpse in the bushes behind the plowman, a motif which has been sensibly related to the German proverb, “Es bleibt keiin Pflug stehen um eines Menschen willen, der stirbt” (“No plow comes to a standstill because a man dies”).53 More generally, as we have seen, the dead man evokes the plowman's age old association with peace and life and his common contrast to war and death.

Though Bruegel made only two images of the falling Icarus, foolish ascent and/or falling are common themes in his work. He painted the Tower of Babel three times,54 a Conversion (fall) of Saul,55 a Birdnester and the Peasant (about to fall), and the (falling) Blind Leading the Blind. He also designed engravings of the Fall of Simon Magus,56 a Fall of Phaeton,57 a Pride with falling figures,58 and a Skaters Outside St. George's Gate with tumbling figures.59 Finally, the related folkloric motif of the “ape or fool in high places” appeared in his Two Monkeys and Dulle Griet60.

dans la poésie française du XVI siècle,” Cahiers de l'association internationale des études françaises, 1973, 261-281; Ronald McFarland, “Thematic Variations in the Myth of Daedalus and Icarus,” Italian Quarterly 1983, 41-58. In the Theologica Platonica (ed. Marcel, II, iii, 24-25), Ficino invokes Icarus in praising the “supercelestial” human mind which lords over all things and “goes beyond the skies”. See André Chastel, Marsile Ficin et l'art, Geneva, 1954, 60. for the heroic Icarus in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, see Ginzburg, op. cit., marc Eigeldinger, “Le mythe d'Icare dans la poésie Française du XIXe siècle”, idem, Lumières du mythe. Paris 1983, 91-126; and Maurice Shroder, Icarus, The Image of the Artist in French Romanticism, Cmabridge, Mass., 1961, 55-59.

44 Stridbeck, op. cit.; Lindsay and Huppé, op. cit.; Vivier, op. cit.; Eigeldinger, op. cit.; Turner, op. cit.; Ann Lowenthal, “The Disgracers: Four Sinners in One Act,” in A.M. Logan, ed., Essays in Northern European Art Presented to Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann on His 60th Birthday, Doornspijk 1983, 148-153; Ashton, op. cit.; Ginzburg, op. cit.; Green, op. cit.; and Roberts-Jones, op. cit.

48 Jones, op. cit., 28, already illustrated this engraving in discussing Bruegel's Icarus.

49 Louis Lebeer, “De Blauwe Huyck,” Gentsche Bijdrgen, VI, 1939, 161-229, esp. 171, 173, 174, 209. One of these prints, entitled Blauwe Huyck, was published by Johannes a Doetinchum in 1577. The other two are nameless and date from the later sixteenth century. One is also illustrated by Jones, op. cit., 28.

50 Lebeer, op. cit., 1969, 116, asks if the mythological figures were added by another hand. Presuming the whale and the cross on the hill are Bruegel's, it seems the figures were at least conceived by him as well. The print comes from a series of ship scenes illustrated in Lebeer, op. cit., 1969, 111-126. Another print of the falling Icarus, engraved by Georges Hoefnagel, may derive from a design by Bruegel. Illustrated in Lebeer, op. cit., 1969, 179, its inscription refers to moderation.

51 Illustrated in Lebeer, op. cot, 1969, 75.

52 For the harbor-headed ship as a salvation motif, see Danielou, op. cit., 58-70; J. Richard Judson, “Marine symbols of Salvation in the Sixteenth Century,” in Essays in Memory of Karl Lehman, New York 1964, 136-154; Henri Rondet, “Le symbolisme de la mer chez Saint Augustin,” Augustinus Magister: Études Augustiniennes, Paris, 1954, 691-791; Hugo Rahner, Symbole der Kirche, Salzburg 1964, 239-406; Robert Scribner, For the sake of simple folk: Popular propoganda for the German Reformation, Cambridge, Eng., 1979, 106-115. Bruegel's ship is also interpreted this way in Lindsay and Huppé, op. cit., 382, 384.

53 Gustav Glück, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, trans. E. B. Shaw, London 1936, 24.

If this context puts Icarus at the thematic center of Bruegel's art, it also sharpens the contrast in the painting between the Icarus and the plowman and leads us to note similar contrasts elsewhere in the image. Bruegel's ship, for example, sails past the watery grave of Icarus, its sailors as absorbed in their mission of reaching the harbor as is the plowman in his earthly work. While serving as a metaphor for salvation and Senecan moderation, the boat presents a simpler visual contrast to Icarus. For sailors utilize air and water in a sensible manner to get on with the business of life. Icarus' unnatural flying, already remarked by Ovid and Dio Chrysostom, is followed by an equally unnatural and iconographically unusual thrashing in the water where he proves no better as a fish. Bruegel developed further watery contrasts with Icarus through the nearby fisherman who also makes good use of the sea. With respect to the element of air, Icarus' head was submerged beneath the waves, shut off from the breath of life.61 More importantly, Bruegel juxtaposed Icarus' falling feathers with the ship's wind-filled sails (Fig. 10). This prudent use of air was strengthened by the sail trimming needed as the ship nears the dangerous rocky shore.62 This contrast between unnatural and natural air technology, feathers and sails, acquired greater irony in the context of Pliny's statement that Icarus invented sails and sailing.63 Pausanias and Diodorus even claimed Daedalus and Icarus has escaped by sailing.64

If various activities relating to earth, air, and water were stressed visually in Bruegel's Icarus, the importance of fire emerged in the iconographically unusual setting sun. Though Ovid implied a sun at high noon, Bruegel lowered it to the horizon, presumably to reinforce its importance as he did with the low, late afternoon sun in his engravings of Summer (Fig. 11). The inscription on this print reads, “Frugiferas arvis fert Aestas torrida messeis” (“Hot summer brings fertile crops to the fields”). Similarly, the hot sun in Bruegel's Icarus brings fertile crops and life to the farmer, but death to Icarus. The introduction of a setting sun may also suggest the timeless cycles of a golden age and a natural order indifferent to folly. See thus, the whole picture emerges as a cosmological panorama which goes on with its elemental rhythms, its husbandry and commerce, its life and death, its labor and folly, until the final day when those who have “plowed diligently” enter the harbor of God's kingdom.

With its elemental contrasts, the picture would have also suggested to its educated viewers one of the central questions of Renaissance humanism: what was human nature and how did it relate to nature's wider orders.65 The more conservative answer favored in the North drew on scriptural sources like Job 5:7, “Man is born to labor and the bird to fly,” and Romans 12:6, “Mind not

61 In Jan Sadeler's engraving after a design by Dirck Barendsz, the inscription refers to air as the “breath of life”. See judson, op. cit., 1970, fig. 74, cat. 92.

62 A presumably Senecan sail-trimming also appears in Bruegel's engraving of Prudence where a sailboat beats upwind toward home port. For a Renaissance Icarus used to illustrae Air, see Michael Hirst, Sebastiano del Piombo, Oxford 1981, 33-35. For plowing in Earth, see Jan Bruegel the Elder's Earth in the series of the Four Elements in the Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome. Fishing appears in Jacob de Gheyn I's Water, illustrated in Hollstein, VII, p. 119. A mythological series of the Four Elements designed by Dirck Barendsz was engraved by jan Sadeler I in 1587. See Hollstein, XXI, p. 169; and Judson, op. cit., 1970, nos. 90-93, figs. 72-75. For the fundamental role of mythology in medieval and Renaissance cosmology, see Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, New York 1953.

63 Natural History, BK. 7, 56, 209, cited in Turner, op. cit., 14, Loeb ed., 647.

64 Cited in Turner, op. cit., 14.

high things but condescend to men of low estate.”66 In the Imitatio Christi, Thomas a Kempis repeatedly stressed an earthbound humility. “All men nature dearly love to know, But knowledge without fear of God-what is it worth? Better indeed a humble peasant, fearing God, Than the proud thinker who neglects himself musing on the courses of the stars.”67 Similar warnings appeared in John Ratsell's play, The Nature of the Four Elements, 1517.68 Like other humanistic plays, Ratsell's urged mankind to study its place in the world, beginning with the four elements, as a prelude to any eventual knowledge of God. Such ideas of cosmological knowledge and particularly self-knowledge were common in Northern sixteenth-century humanism.69 In his famous Apology for Raymond Sebond, Montaigne wrote.

65 For cosmological self-knowledge, moderation, and the appeal of wings in Gelli's Circe (1549), see E. m. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, New York, n.d., 81.

54 Stridbeck, op. cit., 247-252; Walter Gibson, Pieter Bruegel, New York and Toronto 1977, 27-28, 93-97. also see Joscelyn Godwin, Athanasius Kirchner, London 1979, 34-43.

55 For Paul as an example of Pride, see Luba Eleen, The Illustrations of the Pauline Epistles in French andEnglish Bibles of the Twelfth and Thirteen Centuries, Oxford 1982, 38-41; and Lester K. Little, “Pride Goes Before Avarice: Social Change and the Vices in Latin Christendom,” American Historical Review 1981, 16-49, esp. 31-37.

56 Lebeer, op. cit., 1969, 143.

57 Ibid., 124. for Phaeton and Icarus as twin examples of hubris, see Turner, op. cit.; vivier, op. cit.; Ginzburg, op. cit.; Erwini Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, Oxford 1939, Icon. ed., 1972, 219.

58 Ibid., 68. See other prints of Pride with falling figures in A. M. Hind, Early Italian Engravings, London 1938, II, no. A.11.20; Henri Zerner, The School of Fontainebleau, New York 1969, L.D. 86; and Strauss, Goltzius, op. cit., I, 172-173, no. 82. See also Heemskerck's allergory of ambition in Lowenthal, op. cit., 151-152.

59 See the discussion in Linda and George Bauer, “The Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap by Pieter Bruegel the Elder,” Art Bulletin, 1984, 145-150, esp. 149, and fig. 4.

60 Margaret Sullivan, “Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 'Two Monkeys': A New Interpretation,” Art Bulletin 1981, 114-126. According to Sullivan, the Two Monkeys is yet another plea for moderation.

66 Job 5:7 is quoted in Innocent III's On the Misery of the Human Condition, ed. Donald R. Howard, Indianapolis 1969, bk. I.11, p. 13. For the popularity of this work in the Renaissance, see Donald R. Howard, “Renaissance World Alienation,” in Robert S. Kinsman, ed., The Darker Side of the Renaissance, Berkeley 1974, 47-76, esp. 55-57. Ginzburg, op. cit., discusses the relation of Romans 16:6 to the Icarian tradition. For the Western ambivalence toward “curiositas”, see Hans Joachim Mette, “Curiositas”, in Festschrift Bruno Snell, Munich 1956, 227-235; André Labhardt, “Curiositas: Notes sur l'histoire d'un mot et d'une notion,” Museum Helveticum 1960, 206-224.

67 Imitation of Christ, ch. II.11.1-4; New York ed. 1889, 5. Sebastian Brant, op. cit., 220-225, also ridicules intellectual presumption into the cosmos as self-deception.

68 For a passage from Ratsell attacking people who “would know high things and know nothing at all/Of the earth whereon they daily be,”, see Theodore Spender, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, 2nd ed., New York 1949, 1966 paper ed., 57-58.

69 See John Davies's poem, “Nosce Teipsum” (“Know thyself”) London, 1599. He invokes Prometheus, Phaeton, Icarus, and all mankind as the “wretched offspring” of Adam and Eve, doomed to the folly of hubris where “none

Presumption is our natural and original malady. The most vulnerable and frail of all creatures is man, and at the same time the most arrogant. He feels and sees himself lodged here, amid the mire and dung of the world, nailed and riveted to the worst, the deadest, and the most stagnant part of the universe ... farthest from the vault of heaven ... and in his imagination he goes planting himself above the circle of the moon ... by the vanity of this same imagination ... he equals himself to God.70

Self-knowledge was particularly important in Coornhert, Heemskerck and Erasmus.71 In the Adages for example, Erasmus reiterated Plato's influential conflation of moderation and self-knowledge.72 His remarks came in a discussion of the Socratic injunction, “Nosce teipsum” (“know thyself”) “in which modesty and a middle way are commended, lest we strive for things too great for us, or else unworthy of us. For every evil of life comes from this ... “.73 True self-knowledge brings moderation and humility. In the Praise of Folly, Folly celebrated Phythagoras who “came to the conclusion that no creature is more miserable than man; for all the others are satisfied with their natural limitations, but man alone strives to go beyond the bounds proper to his station”.74 In the early days of history, before folly reigned, mankind

had too much piety to search out, with a profane curiosity, the secrets of nature; to investigate the dimensions, motions, and influences of the stars, or the hidden causes of things; deeming it a sacrilege for mortal man to try to know more than is proper to his station. This madness of inquiring what may lie beyond the sky never entered their heads.75

Though of none of these texts mentioned Icarus, they encompassed the Icarian theme with its fatal cosmological hubris and self-deception. We have seen this Icarian violation of nature's laws Ovid where wings were a rash attempt to “change man's very nature”. Perhaps inspired by this phrase, Bruegel combined his own landscape talents and humanistic interests to develop an unprecedented cosmological Icarus, an Icarus exploring the nature of human nature. Even if we had no parallels in Montaigne and Erasmus, this interpretation would find adequate support in Bruegel's other works exploring mankind's lack of self-knowledge. It is central to the Christ and the Adulterous Woman, the Blind Leading the Blind, and the Naples Misanthrope. The latter's excessive rejection of the World is a blindness which allows the world to rob him.76 In the background, as in the Icarus, a diligent shepherd watches faithfully over his sheep. Self-deception (and an imminent fall) also appear in the Vienna Peasant and the Birdnester, a picture that plays on a rich contemporary iconography of false pathways, moral stumbling, blindness, and ditches of folly.77 Like the misanthrope, of the rabbit hunter in another Bruegel-designed engraving,78 the peasant thinks he knows something of importance or has some (moral) advantage. Yet he deceives himself; his hypocrisy and pride promise a fall in the hidden ditch before him.79 Finally, self-knowledge and moderation are fundamental to the print of Elck (Everyman) (Fig. 12). In the rear of this allegory of greed and ambition, we see an image of Nemo (Nobody), who looks at himself in a mirror above the words, “Nobody knows himself.” As the primary inscription on the engraving reminds us, “Always, each man is seeking for

of us, his own soul understands”. See A. H. Bullen, ed., Some Longer Elizabethan Poems, New York, n.d., 43-106, esp. 46-47. Also see Jerome Schwartz, “Panurge's Impact on Pantagruel (Pantagruel, chapter IX),” Romanic Review, 1, 1976, 1-8. For a brief discussion of Renaissance flight, see Clive Hart, “Flight in the Renaissance,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 5, 1979, 20-32.

himself alone, And no man knows himself despite such seeking ... Though he looks with eyes forever open, He never sees at last his own true face.”80

In Bruegel's painting, the contrast of a drowning Icarus and a diligent peasant lead us to the same question, but framed in the cosmological terms of landscape, of mankind's proper relation to Nature and to God. If Icarus reminds us of the mortal dangers of immoderation and self-deception, the plowman displays an opposing self-knowledge, a simple understanding of Nature's laws, a productive labor maintaining human life. The contrast between the figures serves an Erasmian humanism at the heart of Brugel's art. The Icarus succeeds so brilliantly, in part because of this simple yet powerful visual interplay between pagan myth and Flemish genre. If the two realms work initially as an antithesis, Bruegel yet realized a more subtle and profound coexistence of myth with peasant life through aesthetic means. For just as the plowman took on an unprecedented heroic scale,81 so the “Flemish” coast was transfigured into a remote and mountainous landscape; both were appropriate to the majestic, visionary realm of myth. If myth thus transformed Flemish genre, genre in turn brought home myth to a modern Flemish audience, “translating” it into a moral vernacular just as Netherlandish dramatists translated Greek and Roman drama and Biblical stories into their own moral Carnival plays, prodigal son plays, and tragi-comedies describing peasant and bourgeois life.82 In the fifteenth century, Sebastian Brant led the way to this vernacular humanism, using everyday imagery in text and illustration to reach a mass audience. As Jane Goldsmith has shown, Brant supervised the design of illustrations for a Latin edition of Vigil's complete works published in Strasbourg in 1502. At the end of the book, Brant explained, “Let others explain Virgil in eloquent speech and be pleased to hand him on to boys by pen and words of mouth. Brant wished to publish him for the unlearned and rustic men with simple pictures and drawings.”83 Through a Latin Virgil was hardly intended for “unlearned and rustic men”, Brant's vernacular works did address such an audience with a vernacular imagery and illustration.

In the sixteenth century, Erasmus and other Northern humanists argued for vernacular editions of Scripture so that workers and farmers could know God's word directly.

I disagree very much with those who are unwilling that Holy Scripture, translated into the vulgar tongue, be read by the uneducated, as if Christ taught such intricate doctrines that they could scarcely be understood by very few theologians, or as if the strength of the Christian religion consisted in men's ignorance of it ... I wish that they were translated into all languages ... Would that, as a result, the farmer sing some portion of them at the plow, the weaver hum some parts of them to the movement of his shuttle, the traveler lighten the weariness of the journey with stories of this kind.84

Though Lutherans echoed Erasmus' common man versed in Scripture-Tyndale and others even repeated the example of the plowman-the difference between Protestant and humanist justifications of vernacular Scripture sheds interesting light on Bruegel's Icarus.85 For Luther and other Protestants, the translated Bible destroyed the power of the Catholic church, holding up to 84 Paracelsis, Basel 1516, Craig R. Thompson, “Scripture for the Ploughboy and Some Others,” in Dale Randall and George Williams, eds., Studies in the Continental Background of Renaissance English Literature. Essays Presented to John L. Lievsay, Durham, NC, 1977, 3-28, esp. 8. For the same plowman in a later letter of Erasmus used in the preface to his Paraphrase of Matthew 1522, see ibid., 11-13. In a letter to Paul Volz of 1518, Erasmus compared peasants to legs, feet, and even genitals of the body of Christ. See The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 842-992, 1518-19, trans R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson, Toronto, 1982, letter 858, p. 81. For peasants as the hardworking legs sustaining the rest of the “body politic”, see Mohl, op. cit., 261-264, 315-316; and Tillyard, op. cit., 98.

it the simple apostolic truth of God's word. With this would come an individual Protestant faith, a priesthood of believers free from idolatry, the pride of good works, and other Catholic “abominations”.86 For humanists like Erasmus, the vernacular Bible would end the late medieval piety of scholastic intellectualism, monastic retreat, and useless works such as pilgrimages or endlessly repeated rosaries. In its place would be a new faith of Christian action, a living piety of practical works inspired by the human dramas of the Scripture.87 The vernacular Bible for Erasmus then was above all a moral Bible, speaking directly tot he heart with a familiar language and engendering a true, living Christianity. So too, Bruegel's farmer with his modern-horse-drawn plow both translates and moralizes the Icarian myth, making it more comprehensible while addressing contemporary spiritual, ethical, and social concerns.88

85 In his Book of Martyrs (London 1563, 514), John Foxe reports a remark made by Tyndale to a theologian. “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost,” quoted in Thompson, op. cit., 3. In Stephen Langton's twelfth-century justification for vernacular preaching, the plow already appears as a metaphor for a rustic, everyday style more effective at winning large audiences. See Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed., Oxford 1983, 253-254. for the frequency of husbandry imagery in sixteenth-century preaching, see Blench, op. cit., 124-126, 145-146, 154-156, 173-177, 186-187, 203, 343.

70 The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame, Stanford 1958, 330-331.

71 Ilja M. Veldman, Maarteen van Heemskerck and Dutch Humanism in the Sixteenth Century, Maarssen 1977, 57-62, fig. 27. For moderation in Coornhert and Heemskerck, see ibid., 70-74, and Lowenthal, op. cit., 148-153. Also see Philip Sohm, “Dürer's Melancholia I.: The Limits of Knowledge,” Studies in the History of Art, IX, 1980, 13-32.

72 Helen North, Self-Knowledge and Self-Restraint in Greek Literature, Ithaca 1966; eadem, From Myth to Icon. Reflections of Greek Ethical Doctrine in Literature and Art, Ithaca 1979.

73 Adagiorum Chiliades, Basel 1515, I.VI. XCV, translated in Margaret Mann Philips, The 'Adages” of Erasmus, Cambridge, Eng., 1964, 11. Self-knowledge is also important in chapters four and five of the Enchiridion: to know yourself is “an injunction which antiquity believed to have originated in heaven and which great authors have found so pleasing that they consider the whole fruit of wisdom compactly enclosed in it.” See the Enchiridion, op. cit., 62. See also Eliza Warkins, The Delphic Maxims in Literature, Chicago 1929.

74 The Praise of Folly, trans. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson, Princeton 1941, 46-57.

75 Praise of Folly, op. cit., 44.

76 Robert Huges, The Complete Paintings of Bruegel, New York 1967, pl. LII. For the intellectual background, see Harry Berger, Jr., “Utopian Folly: Erasmus and More on the Perils of Misanthropy,” English Literary Renaissance, 1982, 271-290.

77 Ibid., pl. LIV, Coupe, op. cit., 179-183; Samuel Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life, New Haven 1962, 174-181; and Kahren Hellerstedt, “The Blind Man and His Guide in Netherlands Painting,” Simiollus 1983, 163-181.

78 Philipp Fehl, “Peculiarities in the Relation of Text and Image in Two Prints by Peter Bruegel: the 'Rabbit Hunter' and 'Fides',” North Carolina Museum of Art Bulletin 1970, 25-36, esp. 28-29. Fehl notes that the “hunter hunted” is common in proverb literature and appears in Bruegel's Big Fish Eat Little Fish.

79 Using a falling birdnester as an illustration, Brant (op. cit., 1440 ridicules those who “Will aim at birds' nests very high, Hence oft upon the ground will lie”. Brant (154-155) also discusses in detail the fool who laughs at another falling fool before falling himself. Both Icarus and Phaeton are mentioned as fools who fell. The hypocrite who laughs at another's folly is also a frequent target of Erasmus' ridicule. In the Praise of Folly (op. cit., 27)

Though the Protestant celebration of the “evangelical peasant” turned sour after the Peasant War of 1524-5,89 the “Good Plowman” remained common in mid-sixteenth-century Flemish art. If Bruegel's drunken peasants summed up for bourgeois viewers all that was uncivilized in human nature, if they displayed a traditional proximity to nature in a dirty, bestial sense,90 the hard working peasant of the Icarus and the Seasons became positive Everymen, showing a metaphysical closeness to God's creation traditionally lost to city dwellers.91 Such urban alienation had taken on a new urgency in the sixteenth-century North as profound social and economic changes disrupted Flemish life. As the center for trade in the North, Antwerp saw the rise of large fortunes amid unrestrained speculation on commodities and capital. The possibility of sudden wealth and changes in social position were present as never before. Everywhere men and women seemed possessed by the fanatical ambition and greed explored in Bruegel's Elce, Dulle Griet, and numerous contemporary images and plays.92 In such a context, Bruegel's Icarus was a reassuring Virgilian image of ontological harmony, somewhat nostalgic, yet compelling in its modern forms.

If this painting typifies the new, more positive imagery of peasant life found in the sixteenth century, there is beneath its timeless, “universal” metaphor a faint but unmistakable hint of contemporary social repression, the celebration of an obedient peasantry keeping to its God-given place. In putting aside sword for plow, Bruegel's plowman seems to avoid the potentially fatal hubris of demanding a better lot. He may well have evoked faint memories of the disastrous peasant uprisings of the mid 1520s. Such upheavals remained a real possibility throughout the sixteenth century given the lack of improvement in peasant conditions. In any case, the Icarus was almost certainly painted for a well to do city dweller, perhaps someone who had a country retreat or wished he did, perhaps a wealthy figure like the Antwerp banker, Jonghelinck, who owned the Labors of the Months. As such, the Icarus shows a typical humanistic blend of timeless metaphor and contemporary social reality, something already clear in Alberti's Della Famiglia. There the spiritual refreshment which farm life offers to wealthy city people in praised in the same breadth as the peasants are scorned: “it is hard to believe how much wickedness there is among the plowmen raised up among the clods”.93 Though Bruegel's plowman is not shown as wicked, the Fall of Icarus presumably kept its urban owner in touch

Stoic philosophers are “equipped with such eyesight that they scan the faults of their friends with the keen vision of an eagle ... though they are sand-blind toward their own vices.” Scientists, on the other hand, are so blind that they do not see the ditch or the stone lying across their path”. See also Hellerstedt, op. cit.

80 Irving Zupnick, “The meaning of Bruegel's 'Nobody' and 'Everyman',” Gazette de Beaux-Arts 1966, 257-270.

81 Bruegel's peers and successors painted the fall of Icarus more “correctly”, with the Ovidian plowman as one of a number of diminutive witnesses looking up. In turn, Icarus was shown falling and the sun placed higher in the sky. see the examples in Madeleine Huillet d'Istra, “La chute d'Icare et Hans Bol”, Koninklijk Museum Jaarboek. Antwerp 1971, 73-90; Jan Sadeler I's engraving in Hollstein, XXII, 147, no. 480; and Joos de Momper's painting in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

82 Thomas Best, Macropedius, New York 1972; Derek van Abbé, Drama in Renaissance Germany and Switzerland, London 1961; Marvin Herrick, Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century, Univ. of Illinois 1964; and W. E. D. Atkinson, Acolasstus. A Latin Play of the Sixteenth Century, London, Ontario 1964.

83 Jane ten Brink Goldsmith, “From Prose to Pictures: Leonaert Bramer's Illustrations for the 'Aeneid' and Vondel's Translation of Virgil,” Art History 1984, 21-37, esp. 24.

with the eternal verities of nature without the distaste and inconvenience of dealing with real peasants.

Though I have proposed, in this article, a variety of readings for Bruegel's painting, I hope the reader sees them as complimentary rather than mutually exclusive. A multifaceted reading seems entirely appropriate for such a complex work of art with its references in so many different directions. Surely the Icarus aroused a variety of responses according to the experiences and attitudes brought by different sixteenth-century beholders. Reducing it to a visual statement of a single meaning would only falsify the painting as art and obscure Bruegel's achievement as an artist. Though I have tried to establish and clarify certain areas and nuances of

86 See Thompson, op. cit., and John McDiarmid, “Humanism, Protestantism, and English Scripture, 1533-1540,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 14, 1984, 121-138, esp. 130-138.

87 Thompson, op. cit.; and McDiarmid, op. cit., 123-126. The earliest vernacular Bibles favored a didactic approach to Scripture rather than the theological or mystical approach suited to Latin reading intellectuals. see Rosemarie Potz McGerr, “Guyart Desmoulings, the Vernacular Master of Histories, and his Bible Historiale,” Viator 1983, 211-44.

88 The horse and modern plow in Bruegel's Icarus is presumably part of his “translation”, horses being used for plowing only from the later eleventh century on. See Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change, Oxford 1963, 39-78. Classical plows used oxen and were much cruder, as seen in two Renaissance images of ancient plowmen cited above in n. 7.

89 Moxey, op. cit.; R. W. Scribner, “Images of the Peasant, 1514-1525,” Journal of Peasant Studies 1975, 29-48; Scribner, op. cit., 1979; Paul Russell, “'Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy ...' (Joel 2:28). Common People and the Future of the Reformation in the Pamphlet Literature of Southwestern Germany to 1525,” Archive for Reformation History, 74, 1983, 122-139; Werner Packull, “The Image of the 'Common Man' in the Early Pamphlets of the Reformation,” Historical Reflections, 12, 1985, 253-277; and Ronald J. Sider, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt. The Development of His Thought 1517-1525, Leiden 1974, 137, 177-178. Karlstadt went so far as to adopt peasant garb in 1523.

90 Pelagius gives a typical description of the peasant's negative, metaphysical earthiness (as cited in Coulton, op. cit., 244), they join themselves in lust with the beasts whom they keep ... even as they plough and dig the earth all day long, so they become altogether earthy; they lick the earth, they eat the earth, they speak of the earth”.

91 Medieval examples of the natural peasant vs. the unnatural courtier are cited in C. Stephen Jager, The Origins of Courtliness, Philadelphia 1985, 153, 155, 218. In Bruegel's hands however, as has been noted, the peasant often undergoes a positive metamorphosis, echoing natural shapes. In the Haymaking painting and engraving of Summer (Fig. 10), baskets of vegetables merge with the heads of peasants. In the Harvesters, bending women resemble the triangular sheaves of wheat while sleeping man extends, rootlike, from the base of the pear tree. In turn, the group of lunching peasants spreads out on the ground, echoing the spreading branches above. The pears and bread they eat come from a hard-won coexistence with the nature around them. Their rest in no slothful but corresponds to the midday peasant rest described cosmologically in Jan Sadeler's engraving Midday (1582): “weary with labor, the reapers revive their bodies with dining and sleep. Thus Nature, our parent, has granted us strength to be, and has established a limit, so that all things may keep a steady course,” See Judson, op. cit., 1970, cat. 99. In an unpublished paper, Karen Koehler pointed out the parallel in the Icarus between the furrowed earth and the folds of the plowman's coat.

92 See S. J. Vries, “Rederijkersspelen als historische Dikumenten,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 1942, 185-198; H. van der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market, The Hague 1963; and Keith Moxey, “The Criticism of Avarice in Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Painting,” in Netherlandish Mannerism, Stockholm 1985, 21-34, with further references. For female ambition, see Walter Gibson, “Bruegel, Dulle Griet, and Sexist Politics in the Sixteenth Century,” in Otto von Simson and Matthias Winner, ed., Pieter Bruegel und seine Welt, Berlin 1979, 9-16.

meaning, my overall goal has been to open up the painting tot he richer interpretation it deserves and which awaits it in the future.

I am grateful to Walter Gibson, Craig Harbison, Keith Moxey, and Konrad Oberhuber for many helpful suggestions. This article is dedicated to Konrad Oberhuber whose lectures on Bruegel sowed the seeds of my own work.

93 The Family in Renaissance Florence (I Libri della famiglia), trans. Renee Neu Watkins, Columbia, S.C., 1969, 189.