Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted how ships sail alongside the falling Icarus: This is how the media, from “China Daily” to Russian state broadcasters, react to an unpunished crime.
In the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels hangs a painting that has long been attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder: “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”. It refers to a motif from Ovid's Metamorphoses. During his escape from Crete, Daedalus' son came very close to the sun using the wings built by his father: the wax that held the feathers together melted, the young man fell into the sea and died.
What is central to the Roman poet goes almost unnoticed in the Flemish master. Its dominant features are a farmer, ships with billowing sails, and the vastness of the sea. All that can be seen of Icarus are his legs, which will soon sink into the water, in one last movement. WH Auden wrote a moving poem about such disproportions: “Musée des Beaux Arts”. The ship would continue to sail calmly after this surprising fall: “They were never mistaken about suffering / The old Masters…”
Such differences in perspective can also be seen in reactions to Alexei Navalny's death.