Paesaggio con la caduta di Icaro

The story is the boy who flew too close to the sun, but you have to hunt for him. Momper, an Antwerp painter, borrowed the idea from an earlier Bruegel composition. A huge landscape of sea, ships and far-off hills fills almost everything, and the ploughman, the shepherd and the angler go about their day. Icarus is a small pale splash near a boat, already in the water, noticed by no one. Momper built his name on exactly this kind of sweeping panorama, painted in blue-green distances that pull the eye back for miles. The picture ended up in Stockholm as spoils of war, carried north in 1648 as the long fighting across the German lands finally wound down.