From Painting to Literature

Interdisciplinarity is very much encouraged, especially in contemporary approaches to art. The most common topic focuses on the transposition of literary texts into visual works: from literature to painting, photography and films or the other way round. Interferences with other arts and/or sciences contribute to the openness of the literary works as well as to the development of the art consumers’ imagination. This leads to a derived creation at the level of the reader/viewer/audience, to the authority of the work of art which generates meanings beyond the writer’s authority.

In my paper I shall refer to Pieter Breughel’s Fall of Icarus and one of the poems that it inspired, W.H.Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts, the latter being an artistic reading of the former, as the author himself mentions in the poem. Auden’s poem is, of course, a limited perception of the painting, meant not to criticize/interpret Breughel’s work, but to echoes the visual elements and their message as the poet understood them.

Both works are indebted to the well known legend of Icarus whose flight too close to the sun was transformed into a fall. While the painter decides upon directing the viewers towards the legend thank to the title, W.H.Auden declines this source of inspiration as he was actually inspired by the paintings in Musee des Beaux Arts. They are brought together by an example the poet uses in his work: “In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance…”. Both Titles seem misleading: in the painting the viewer can hardly see the legs of a person who may be Icarus, which implies the idea of the fall; in the poem the title actually refers to the museum where the author could see Breughel’s painting.

The two works succeed in transmitting the same idea by using different techniques and materials: colours and words and they are complementary. In Fall of Icarus, a very challenging title, Pieter Breughel makes everything visible but Icarus. The painter encompasses various activities of people’s everyday life suggesting calmness and monotony. The man ploughing the land requires focalization due to his size, the vivid colour of his shirt and his front position. His body reveals that he is overwhelmed, either by his work or by the setting sun. Monotony and regularity are suggested by the furrows behind the plough. In the middle of the painting a shepherd and his dog awaits the end of the day. Sheep are scattered around and their immobility may suggest the petrified time, the fact that things do not change. The same idea of repetition and monotony arises from the overflowing river and the waves hitting the bank, the two ships sailing calmly in the same direction, sunwards.

While the above mentioned ideas outline the immediacy of a fist “reading” of the painting, Auden’s poem starts by mentioning “suffering” as a theme:

“About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well they understood

Its human position; …”

Trying to associate the ideas – that suffering has a human position and that the “Old Masters”, who can be the artists, understood its position well – with the painting, an evolution from general to particular is possible. First of all suffering is an aspect of human condition and although not obvious with the common people doing domestic activities, nobody can deny its existence. “The Old Masters” make the difference because they are neither present nor suggested in the painting, therefore the painter is one of them and suffering is expected to be reflected in the painting.