All together now | 18 October 2018

‘About suffering’, W.H. Auden memorably argued in his poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, the old masters ‘were never wrong’. Great and terrible events — martyrdoms and nativities — took place amid everyday life, while other people were eating, opening a window or ‘just walking dully along’. As an example, Auden took ‘The Fall of Icarus’ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. As it happens, Auden himself was wrong there, because the work he cited is no long thought to be by the painter after all. This picture is not, therefore, included in the exhibition Bruegel at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. However, the fact that Icarus has now been consigned to the vague penumbra of ‘after’ and ‘circle of’ is a detail. On the essential point, Auden was absolutely correct. You see it time after time in this marvellous array of paintings. Time and again, Bruegel hides away the scene that you might have imagined was the whole point of his picture.