We are all, I think, captivated by the myth of Icarus - the compulsion to defy the elements, to pit our wits against the forces of nature, to ascend above the earth in the seemingly impossible act of flight. It is a concept that has captured the human imagination for millennia and even today, when we take to the skies at regular and increasingly guilt-tinged intervals, the sensation of being above the clouds is still thrilling.
The ancient Greek figure of Daedalus was possibly the first great polymath. HIs name, in Greek, means ‘skilfully wrought’. It was Daedalus who invented the means of flight for himself and his son, Icarus, to escape from the Labyrinth that Daedalus had built for the Cretan King Midas to house the Minotaur.
The earliest-known reference to Daedalus can be found on a clay tablet from Knossos, dated 1380 BCE. He is mentioned by Homer in the Iliad as the maker of a dancing floor for the princess Ariadne but detailed descriptions of his life and achievements occur much later, most memorably by Ovid in the 2nd century AD.
Ovid has Daedalus declaring,
“He (Minos), may thwart our escape by land or sea but the sky is surely open to us, we will go that way. Minos rules everything but he does not rule the Heavens.”
Daedalus explained to his son how the wings he had invented should be used. That they should navigate ‘a middle way’ and be cautious of flying too close to the damp air of the sea below or, especially, to the power of the sun above them. Icarus, with the arrogance and impetuosity of youth, over-reached himself. The wax binding his feathered wings melted in the sun’s heat and Icarus plunged into the (now called Icarian), sea.
This ancient myth has inspired artists ever since its first telling. One of the stone carved lozenges, dedicated to human ingenuity and endeavour, that adorn the 14th century Campanile, or bell tower, in Florence, depicts Daedalus - then considered the father of engineering.
In 1560, Breughel made the Ovidian witnesses of Icarus’s fall; a ploughman, a shepherd and an angler, the focus of his painting, Landscape with the the Fall of Icarus. Here, each figure goes about his business with little notice paid to the tragedy that unfolds before them. The ships are sailing to unknown lands, a partridge watches from the branch of a tree, (another reference to the Daedalus story), the sun is going down on another day. Everything unfolds at its own pace. The tedium of everyday life can, at times, feel suffocating but the extraordinary event that has literally fallen into the painting reminds us that there is a security in the status quo, a satisfaction and comfort in the middle way.
In the 17th century, Rubens and Van Dyck both made paintings of the story. Van Dyck’s is compelling as he used his own features for the figure of Icarus. An early work, painted around 1619, it is an intriguing image, hidden for centuries in private collections. C17th artists were highly conversant with Ovid’s writing and mined his famous poem, Metamorphoses, for exciting and dramatic subject matter.
The picture shows two life size figures. Daedalus, with the darker skin tone, indicative of his older age, fastens the wings to his son’s chest. Despite this moment of intimacy - Icarus lays his hand on his father’s head - the two figures do not make eye contact, perhaps a premonition of the tragedy to come. Father and son seem to embody age and youth, wisdom and foolishness, fear and confidence.
Van Dyck displayed a technical brilliance from an early age and this picture of the son making the break from his father may refer to more than a biological loosening of ties. Van Dyck had a difficult relationship with his own father, from whom he was anxious to distance himself, but he was also the pupil of the undisputed Flemish master, Rubens, who towered over the art scene not only in the Netherlands but across Europe. Van Dyck was keen to forge his own career and reputation distinct from that of his older master. It is interesting that Rubens’ oil sketch, for one of the huge mythological series commissioned by Phillip IV of Spain, shows Icarus in the midst of the tragedy, falling to his fate. Van Dyck’s Icarus has a glint in his eye, ready to be the captain of his own destiny.
In the 19th century when scientific advances threatened to destabilise the traditional order of things, the cautionary tale of Icarus was highly popular. The Lament for Icarus by H.J. Draper in Tate Britain, being a prominent example.
The 20th century witnessed the seemingly miraculous, manned, motorised aircraft take to the skies. Pioneered by the Wright Brothers, whose first flight took place in 1903, Blériot crossed the English Channel in 1909. The Atlantic followed ten years later crossed by the British pilots, Alcock and Brown, in a modified Vickers Vimy bomber.
One of the most prominent art movements to seize upon the thrill and exhilaration of flight was Italian Futurism. Brought into being by the poet, Filippo Marinetti in 1909, it decried the stale, tradition-bound art of the past and championed the glorious power and speed of the machine-age in a full-throated, often violent, embrace.
The Italian word 'Aeropittura' literally translates as 'aerial painting' and the name became synonymous with the second phase of Italian Futurism in the 1930s, of which Tullio Crali was the leading exponent. Crali's works, such as Volo, Verso, L'Ignoto, 1936, (top of page), contain recognisable Futurist elements, from the recreation of speed and movement through simultaneous viewpoints to plunging, dramatic perspective and bright, clashing colours.
Sonia Delauney was one of the most original and inventive artists of the early C20th. In 1937, she produced a number of mural-sized canvases for the Paris International Exposition, of which only three remain. Celebrating French technology, they depict aeroplane engines, a propeller and a cockpit instrument panel. Fusing enlarged technical drawings of engine parts, cut-away sections of pistons and engine blocks with the coloured spirals and discs of the dashboard dials and temperature gauges, these vividly coloured tempera paintings are charged with optimism for a technological future.
The aerial paintings of Peter Lanyon have a dynamic and emotional engagement with the places he loved best. Through his experience of gliding over the Cornish landscape he presents a new view of the land to which he felt most connected.
Lanyon was born and brought up in St Ives and took up gliding in 1959. It immediately became an integral part of his artistic practice, introducing him to the richness and variety of the land below him. He also sought to express the extraordinary interior life of the sky, as complex as that of the sea.
The rise and fall of his glider’s transit echo eternal themes of birth and death, ascent and decline. In a painting like Thermal of 1960, there is no obvious up and down. The elimination of the horizon line, for so long the mainstay of landscape paintings, charges the image, and our experience of it, with a sense of freedom and exhilaration. Lanyon remarked that “sitting in the air, you are sitting in all dimensions", and his paintings from the air remind me of the way Turner dissolved the distinction between air and water in his evocations of storms at sea. These gliding paintings were indeed to be the highs and lows of Lanyon's life. His glider crashed after a bad landing in 1964. Lanyon died in hospital, of a blood clot on the brain, 4 days later.
My next talk will be on the fascinating links between art and flight and I am indebted to a supporter of Tangerine's for suggesting the subject to me last month. It should be a thrilling ride!
Dates and venues to follow shortly.
Image credits
Tullio Crali - Volo, Verso, L'Ignoto, 1936, Private Collection
Pieter Breughel - Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1560, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels
Anthony Van Dyck - Daedalus and Icarus 1619, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
H. J. Draper - The Fall of Icarus, 1898, Tate Britain
Sonia Delaney - Propellor, 1937, Skissernas Museum, Lund, Sweden
Peter Lanyon - Thermal, 1960, Tate Modern
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