![]() ![]() ![]() Both ploughman and shepherd face towards the left of the picture, the former concentrating on his task, the latter gazing upwards. A thin hedge straggles along the further edge of the field, separating it from an area of rough pasture grazed by a flock of sheep, tended by a shepherd who leans on his stick with his dog sitting quietly beside him. Strong low light from the setting sun on the horizon casts crisp shadows of the ridges of soil turned by the plough, and less precise shadows are cast by the ploughman, the plough and the horse. He guides a horse-drawn plough that cuts a striking pattern of furrows across a tiny, undulating field in the foreground. For instance, the brushwork, tone, colour, perspective and positioning of figures might reinforce or subvert the subject matter.īrueghel’s painting centres on a ploughman – the dominant figure in the landscape. Is there a focal point that draws us in? Is there an aerial or atmospheric perspective? (Optical effects can be achieved with the creation of dust particles to mute far away objects.) Is there an obvious vanishing point – do apparently parallel lines converge towards a single point on the horizon? How are colour and tone deployed? Are the colours warm, bright or sombre? Is there a light source in the picture and are parts of the picture deliberately obscure or understated? Being observant about just some of a painting’s qualities can reveal significant tensions as well as correspondences that might exist between its form and content. This leads into the area of perspective and how the spectator’s viewpoint is manipulated – how distant or how close the objects might be and whether we are outside or inside the space the painting occupies. Size matters: if you are not viewing the original in an art gallery, you should at least work out the proportions of a picture and its impact (ranging from intimate cameo to larger-than-life and all the gradations in between). Although a variety of activities may be taking place, the way the figures and objects relate to each other (foreground, background, at the margins of the frame) reveal something of the painter’s priorities. The subject matter is an obvious starting point and the title tells the viewer quite a lot. In these separate boxes you will find a brief biography of Brueghel and Auden plus a few central characteristics (or ‘tools of the trade’) of their chosen genres which can be fruitfully applied to their texts. If not, then you can follow the guidelines below these will help you to analyse artistic and literary techniques in the retelling of the myth. If you already have some skills of visual analysis or feel comfortable with literary critiques of twentieth-century poetry, then both the painting and the poem may prompt you to ask questions about their form and composition. ![]() These subsequent versions of the myth may on the surface depart from Ovid’s narrative, and you should note that the poem is actually reacting to the painting in the first instance, and is, therefore, ‘once removed’ from Ovid. This next section will explore how far Ovid’s own agenda (artistic, personal and, to some extent, ideological) has shaped two famous representations of Icarus in painting (Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus) and poetry (W.H. ![]()
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