The Fall of Icarus

Along a strip of beach behind the falling figure, two small winged men walk on the sand: Daedalus and his son before the flight, the same pair a second time in the same picture. That beach is the painter's own addition. He was working in Antwerp between 1636 and 1638 on one of the canvases Philip IV had ordered for the Torre de la Parada, a hunting lodge in the hills outside Madrid, and the design reached him as a small oil sketch by Rubens. Illustrated editions of Ovid liked that kind of clarifying detail. Rubens had cut it, to keep everything on the moment the wax gives way, when the boy beats his bare arms, finds nothing to hold, and goes down into the water that takes his name. Rubens's sketch survives in Brussels, and there is no beach in it.