![]() ![]() He based his figures and landscape quite closely on the myth of Daedalus and his son Icarus as told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses 8, 183235. This is the only known example of Brueghel's use of a scene from mythology. ![]() The messages they impart are therefore timeless and universal, and this helps to explain why, more than two millennia after they were first written down, they remain such an important influence on Western culture. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus was acquired in 1912. ![]() And as William Empson pointed out about the myth of Oedipus, whatever Oedipus’ problem was, it wasn’t an ‘Oedipus complex’ in the Freudian sense of that phrase, because the mythical Oedipus was unaware that he had married his own mother (rather than being attracted to her in full knowledge of who she was).Īnd this points up an important fact about the Greek myths, which is that, like Aesop’s fables which date from a similar time and also have their roots in classical Greek culture, many of these stories evolved as moral fables or tales designed to warn Greek citizens of the dangers of hubris, greed, lust, or some other sin or characteristic. BlackBerry, an IFC Films release that is in theaters Friday, is rated R for language throughout. Similarly, Narcissus, in another famous Greek myth, actually shunned other people before he fell in love with his own reflection, and yet we still talk of someone who is obsessed with their own importance and appearance as being narcissistic. Johnson’s nicely plotted and sympathetic eye is in every frame, and he sets the tone early on in the first image from 1996: It’s a car driven by the BlackBerry co-creators and it is passing a horse. In a way Icarus was made to suffer for his father’s deeds that were committed well before he was born. (Or, as the Bible bluntly puts it, the love of money is the root of all evil.) The story of the fall of Icarus is a tragic tale that actually originates with his father, Daedalus. The moral of King Midas, of course, was not that he was famed for his wealth and success, but that his greed for gold was his undoing: the story, if anything, is a warning about the dangers of corruption that money and riches can bring. However, as this last example shows, we often employ these myths in ways which run quite contrary to the moral messages the original myths impart. ![]()
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