Musée des Beaux Arts (poem)
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'"Musée des Beaux Arts" (French for "Museum of Fine Arts") is the title of a poem by W. H. Auden from 1938. The poem's title derives from the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels which contains the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, thought until recently to be by Pieter Brueghel the Elder,[1] though still believed to be based on a lost original of his.[2]
"Brueghel's" painting portrays several men and a ship peacefully performing daily activities in a charming landscape. While this occurs, Icarus is visible in the bottom right hand corner of the picture, his legs splayed at absurd angles, drowning in the water.
The allusions in the first part of the poem to a "miraculous birth" and a "dreadful martyrdom" refer obliquely to the Christian story that is also the subject of other paintings by Breughel in the museum that the poem evokes (e.g. "The Numbering at Bethlehem"[3] and "The Massacre of the Innocents"). The "forsaken cry" of Icarus alludes to Christ crying out on the cross, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
Some years after Auden wrote this poem, William Carlos Williams wrote a poem titled "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" about the same painting.
[edit] References
- ^ Says the Museum: "On doute que l'exécution soit de Pieter I Bruegel mais la conception lui est par contre attribuée avec certitude" - "It is doubtful if the execution is by Breugel the Elder, but the composition can be said with certainty to be his" Museum database; see also: JSTORBruegel's "Fall of Icarus": Ovid or Solomon?, Lyckle de Vries, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, Vol. 30, No. 1/2 (2003), pp. 4-18
- ^ JSTOR Radiocarbon Dating of Canvas Paintings: Two Case Studies, Mark J. Y. Van Strydonck, Liliane Masschelein-Kleiner, Cees Alderliesten, Arie F. M. de Jong; Studies in Conservation, Vol. 43, No. 4 (1998), pp. 209-214
- ^ See an online article Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts, Harper's Magazine, November 30, 2008, saying: "The bulk of the poem is clearly about a different painting, in fact it’s the museum’s prize possession: “The Census at Bethlehem.”".
