In “Musée de Beaux Arts,” W.H Auden calls attention to a human’s tendency to ignore the sufferings of the people around him. As Auden provides vivid descriptions of the primary components in Breughel’s Icarus, one might question why Brueghel did not make Icarus’ fall as the focal point of his painting. It seems as if all the subjects in the painting have become so involved in their daily routine, whether it “is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along” (4), that their natural bond with the people around them slowly diminishes. Even when “a boy [falls] out of the sky” (20), they all “[turn] away quite leisurely from the disaster” (15) as if nothing “important” has occurred. Everyone has trapped himself into his own little world, forsaking his relationship with the people around him in order to direct all his attention towards accomplishing his tasks.
Giorgio de Chirico’s painting, The Dying Centaur, demonstrates a similar theme to that of “Musée de Beaux Arts.”Although the painting consists two centaurs, each centaur's life seems detached from the other. While one centaur…show more content… Although both art pieces do convey a sense of loneliness and detachment, they fail to fully express the gravity of all the emotions that a person experiences during a time of defeat. Auden’s poem precisely portrays Icarus’ “white legs disappearing into the green water” (18), but it does not communicate the shame, fear, and sorrow that Icarus suffers as he plummets into the ocean. Similarly, The Dying Centaur accurately depicts the bloody wounds on the centaur, but it unsuccessfully conveys the intensity of the pain that the centaur endures as he lies on the rocky ground. Art possesses the potential to illustrate the flaws in human nature and scenes of failures, but it can only captivate the emotions their subjects experience to a certain
