The History of Quiet Happenings
Image from Flickr with Creative Commons License
Peter Bruegel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is an artwork layered in irony. It’s a mid-sized landscape dating back the 1560s, with sea-green colors and a staggered topography that draws the eye inward and down towards the ocean. A farmer is plowing in the foreground. There are ships in the bay, a small port city on the left side flanked by white-cliff mountains that Bruegel wouldn’t have ever found in Belgium. In the bottom right, there are shepherds, fishermen; there are two legs flailing from the waves in such a little patter that you’d hardly notice if not for title. That this landscape is actually depicting Icarus’s death, quietly in the corner, a momentous and mythical event obscured by the farmer tilling his field, by the ships awaiting their berth in town.
By painting Icarus so small and hidden, Bruegel is participating in a brief artistic irony called the ‘Mannerist Inversion.’ For a few years, Northern Humanist painters dabbled in inverting their scenes, backgrounding the historical content and foregrounding instead the banalities of regular life. Pieter Aetsen painted his Butcher’s Stall the same decade as Bruegel, depicting a lush cart of beef in still-life detail, but with Mary giving out alms in the background. This is a kind of potshot at the hierarchy of genres. There is a tendency to distinguish between the history and religious painting, the landscape, the still-life, the portrait. Some subjects are less serious than others and accordingly are cordoned off from the realm of important art. Aesthetically, the vaulting majesty of grand myths doesn’t seem to belong with quiet scenes of peasant life.
But I wonder if life makes the same distinction? Certainly history does. It is an account of the world’s involvements, what has shaped it on its way to today. And no doubt in history, some make a bigger splash than others. Icarus, for example. But history isn’t the same as life. In the lives of those farmers, in the everyday existence of thousand of people for thousands of years, Icarus’s fall is a mere dropping away, unnoticed, or if seen, then distantly and small. I suspect that it is the profundity of this contrast—between history and life—that has attracted so many poets to Bruegel’s work. The history painting delineates an important event, glorifying it, making it stunning in its contrasts. But often the real world offers no such accent to distinguish the important events of our lives. They pass us by. We realize them only in recollection.
It’s easy to draw away from all this a reductive lesson: history picks and chooses what matters. But I think the opposite is far truer, far more dangerous and compelling. History is happening all around us, all the time. It is veiled by our everyday concerns, not yet magnified by time into the myth it will become. But inconspicuous though it may be, it is nonetheless present, acting and accumulating. It’s comforting to think that history should be watching us—the farmers in our fields—but perhaps instead we should be watching the sea.