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Plate
4 from Americae Retectio |
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Icarian
Knowledge |
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In the early modern period, the classical story of Icarus was often used as a commentary on and warning about illicit knowledge. The theme of flying out into the mala via (ill way) was often metaphorically understood as the arrogant pursuit of knowledge that transgresses the limits of what may be known. The story of Icarus
falling into the sea is originally told in Ovid's Metamorphoses
(8.195 ff). In Ovid's account, Icarus is boyishly awkward and playful
in a way that counterbalances and counteracts his father's skill.
For example, the boy is represented as artlessly underfoot as Daedalus
orders the feathers on his wings, from shortest to longest ("nam
ponit in ordine pennas a minima coeptas, longam breviore sequenti").
In flight, Icarus feels the joy of the open sky and forgets his
father's advice to stay at a moderate height: he speeds past his
father and rises too close to the sun, where the wax on his wings
softens, and he falls into the sea. Icarus seems to represent a
principle of disorder (expressed chiefly through exaltation and
joy) that exacts a price on his father's ability to order materials
in ways that would alter the laws of nature.
Dante uses the images of Icarian flight to emphasize the disorder-in-order principle thematized by Ovid: the violations of natural order in the lower Inferno and the horrible paradox of rising off the ground into flight in order to descend to the next level. By contrast, the "middle way" between flight paths too low and too high is often emphasized as a metaphor of moderation, a character trait that Castiglione in Il Libro del Cortigiano calls mediocritas. Alciati's Emblematum
libellus included a famous emblem of Icarus falling into the
The warning to astrologers thus seems to be part of a competition between impostors—the craftsman and the philosopher. Oddly, then, the poem seems to flip over on itself and come down on the side of Daedalus, since the craftsman's mimetic power in forging the bronze of Icarus can carry such moralizing force. That Alciati's interest seems to be elsewhere than in the Icarus story is perhaps most powerfully felt in the unauthorized edition of 1531, where in place of the famous woodcut of Icarus, there is a picture of the philosopher Thales falling into the well while contemplating the stars. For Alciati, the Icarian
fall is philosophical in nature—not the result of exuberant
soaring, but rather the consequence of contemplating the heavens
while treading the earth. The Thales story has historically represented
philosophy's distance from the everyday. Plato tells the story in
the Theaetetus (174 A), adding that Thales was discovered
in the well the next morning by a "good looking and whimsical
maid from Thrace," who laughed at him. Plato also comments,
"This jest also fits all those who become involved in philosophy."
Seen in the context of these attempts, the images of Icarus falling may have provoked a different sensibility in early-modern readers of emblem books. Flight seems to have been something theorized, and thus considered worth theorizing, by the most important minds of the time; and it seems also to have been an objective pursued by craftsmen and artisans who must have felt they were closing in on success. The homiletic verses warn against trespassing into areas of forbidden knowledge. But the reader of these verses must also have had in mind a sense that flight was already a possibility; indeed, it was already going on all around. Michael Harrawood
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