Musée des Beaux Arts (poem)
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'"Musée des Beaux Arts" (French for "Museum of Fine Arts") is the title of a poem by W. H. Auden from 1938. The poem's title derives its name from the location of Pieter Brueghel the Elder's painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, which is housed in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels.
Brueghel's painting portrays several men and a ship peacefully performing daily activities in a charming landscape. While this occurs, Icarus is visible in the bottom right hand corner of the picture, his legs splayed at absurd angles, drowning in the water.
Art historians maintain that for Brueghel, Icarus was an example of foolishness, not suffering, but Auden was writing the poem as a 20th-century observer, not a scholar.
The allusions in the first part of the poem to a "miraculous birth" and a "dreadful martyrdom" refer obliquely to the Christian story that is also the subject of the other paintings by Breughel that the poem evokes (e.g. "The Numbering at Bethlehem" and "The Massacre of the Innocents"). The "forsaken cry" of Icarus alludes to Christ crying out on the cross, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
Some years after Auden wrote this poem, William Carlos Williams wrote a poem titled "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" about the same painting.
