The architect and artificer Daedalus had been introduced by Ovid in his account of the death of the Minotaur, and the next myth in Metamorphoses tells of the tragic end to Daedalus’ stay on the island of Crete, where he and his son Icarus had effectively been imprisoned since the construction of the labyrinth that had confined the minotaur. Much as Daedalus yearned to leave the island and King Minos, there was no hope of him departing by sea, so he decided to take to the air.

Daedalus built two sets of wings made from feathers held together by beeswax. Once they were completed, he tested his by hovering in the air. He then cautioned his son to fly a middle course: neither so low that the sea would wet the feathers and make them heavy, nor so high that the heat of the sun would damage them. He also told Icarus to follow his lead, and not to try navigating by the stars.

Daedalus fitted his son with his wings, and gave him further advice about how to fly with them. He shed tears as he did that, and his hands trembled. Once they were both ready, Daedalus kissed his son, and flew off in the lead just like a bird with its fledgeling chick in tow.

Towards the end of his career in Rome in 1645-46, the great French painter Charles Le Brun painted Daedalus and Icarus. This shows the master artificer fastening wings made of feathers and wax on his son’s back, prior to their escape from Crete.

Andrea Sacchi’s Daedalus and Icarus (c 1645) shows Daedalus at the left, fitting Icarus’ wings, prior to the boy’s flight. Icarus has his right arm raised to allow the fitting, and looks intently at his new wings. Daedalus is concentrating on adjusting the thin ribbons passing over his son’s shoulders, and may be explaining to him the importance of flying at the right altitude.

Anthony van Dyck’s Daedalus and Icarus (1615-25) shows Daedalus giving his son the vital pre-flight briefing. From the father’s gestures, he is here explaining the importance of keeping the right altitude.

Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Icarus and Daedalus (c 1869), shows the pair on the roof of a tower overlooking the coast. Daedalus is fitting his son’s wings, and looks up at Icarus. The boy holds his right arm up, partly to allow his father to fit the wings, and possibly in a gesture of strength and defiance, as the two will shortly be escaping from Crete. Icarus looks to the right, presumably towards their mainland destination, and Daedalus is wearing a curious scalp-hugging cap intended for flight.

Charles Paul Landon’s (1760–1826) Icarus and Daedalus (1799) shows the moment that Icarus launches into flight from the top of the tower, his arms held out and treading air with his legs during this first flight. Daedalus stands behind, his arms still held horizontally forward from launching his son.

The pair flew over a fisherman holding his rod, a shepherd leaning on his crook, and a ploughman with his plough, amazing them with the sight. They flew past Delos and Paros, and approached further islands, but Icarus started to enjoy the thrill of flying too much, and soared too high. As he neared the sun, the wax securing the feathers in his wings softened, and his wings fell apart.

As Icarus fell from the sky, he called to his father, before entering the water in what’s now known in his memory as the Icarian Sea, between the Cyclades and the coast of modern Turkey. All Daedalus could see were the feathers, remnants of wings, on the surface of the water.

Rubens’ initial oil sketch of The Fall of Icarus (1636) above, was presumably turned into a finished painting by his apprentice Jacob Peter Gowy, below. Icarus, his wings in tatters and holding his arms up as if trying to flap them, plunges past Daedalus. The boy’s mouth and eyes are wide open in shock and fear, and his body tumbles as it falls. Daedalus is still flying, though, his wings intact and fully functional; he looks towards the falling body of his son in alarm. They are high above a bay containing people with a fortified town at the edge of the sea.

Merry-Joseph Blondel’s spectacular painted ceiling showing The Sun or the Fall of Icarus (1819) combines a similar view of Daedalus flying onward, and Icarus in free fall, with Apollo’s sun chariot being driven across the heavens.

Joos de Momper’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c 1565), above, show Icarus’ descent within a much bigger landscape, including some of Ovid’s finer details:

• an angler catching a fish with a rod and line,
• a shepherd leaning on a crook,
• a ploughman resting on the handles of his plough.

To aid the viewer, de Momper has painted their clothing scarlet.

De Momper may also have made the copy, below, of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s famous Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Here, Brueghel makes the viewer work harder to see the crucial elements of the story: all there is to be seen of Icarus are his flailing legs and some feathers, by the stern of the ship at the right. Daedalus isn’t visible at all, but the shepherd leaning on his crook is looking up at him, up to the left. As in de Momper’s own version, Brueghel also shows the ploughman and the angler.

Vlaho Bukovac (Biagio Faggioni) (1855–1922) painted two different versions of Icarus reaching earth: in The Fall of Icarus (1898), one panel of a diptych about this story, he shows Icarus on the seabed, as he drowns, the remains of his wings still visible.

His earlier Icarus on the Rocks (1897) departs from Ovid’s account and has Icarus crash onto rocks; his posture is similar in the two paintings.

Finally, Herbert Draper’s (1863–1920) Lament for Icarus (1898) shows an apocryphal and more romantic view, in which three nymphs have recovered the apparently dry body of Icarus, and he is laid out on a rock while they lament his fate to the accompaniment of a lyre. Perhaps influenced by contemporary thought about human flight, Draper gives Icarus huge wings, and those are shown intact, rather than disintegrated from their exposure to the sun’s heat.

Daedalus was full of remorse, and buried his son’s body on the nearby island. As he was digging his son’s grave, a solitary partridge watched him from a nearby oak tree. The partridge had originally been Daedalus’ nephew, who had been brought to him as an apprentice. As the nephew’s skills and ingenuity grew, Daedalus became envious of him, seeking to kill him and pretend it had been an accident. When Daedalus threw him from the roof of her temple on the Acropolis, Pallas Athena saved the apprentice by transforming him into a partridge in mid-air. The bird still remembers being saved from its fall, and to this day won’t fly far above the ground.

It seems that humans have always wanted to fly like the birds, although it’s clear that few birds have ever wanted to walk far on two legs. As is often the case, our aspiration has been transformed into stories, among the oldest being that of Daedalus and his son Icarus. The father was artificer and master craftsman to King Minos of Crete. After creating the Labyrinth, in which the Minotaur was kept, father and son were effectively imprisoned on the island, and tried to escape by flying with wings constructed from feathers held together by wax.

Charles Landon’s Icarus and Daedalus (1799) shows the moment that Icarus launches in flight from the top of a tower, his arms held out and treading air with his legs during this first flight. Daedalus stands behind, his arms still held horizontally forward from launching Icarus.

The pair flew away successfully, but Icarus grew over-adventurous, flying too high and close to the sun, which melted the wax holding his wings together. He then plunged to his death in the Aegean Sea.

His fatal downfall is shown best in Jacob Gowy’s Fall of Icarus from 1635-7, a conclusion that should deter all but the most foolhardy from trying to fly. Later stories thus show humans flying on mythical beasts with wings, like the hippogriff in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.

Louis-Édouard Rioult’s Roger Rescues Angelica from 1824 shows the pair flying away after he had rescued her from the jaws of an orc, here left somewhere beneath them, as Ruggiero’s mission is successfully accomplished.

Even Cervantes’ Don Quixote, together with his long-suffering squire Sancho Panza, are duped into believing that they flew on a horse, as shown in Salvador Tusell’s illustration from about 1894, based on Gustave Doré’s fine series of prints.

As mythical flying beasts have ceased to be credible, the forces at work in human flight have grown darker.

In Goethe’s Faust it’s Mephistopheles himself who takes his victim into the air, as painted by Mikhail Vrubel in his Flight of Faust and Mephistopheles from 1896. Here Vrubel uses small and sometimes tiled patches of flat colour, outlined in black, to model the figures, similar to a style adopted by many of the artists who illustrate modern graphic novels.

If it’s not the Devil himself who does the flying, then it’s one of the many witches that serve as his acolytes.

Fritz Roeber’s Walpurgis Night Scene from ‘Faust’ from about 1910 shows this later scene, with Gretchen, Mephistopheles in red, and Faust surrounded by flying witches holding pitchforks.

Francisco Goya’s Witches’ Flight shows three witches levitating in the air while carrying a naked body, which they appear to be exorcising. Below them are a donkey and another two human figures, one shrouded in a white sheet to cover their eyes, the other lying on the ground covering their ears, a possible reference to Goya’s own deafness and tinnitus when he painted this in 1798.

The Age of Enlightenment brought a more physical and realistic approach to human flight, first using hot air balloons.

In the early eighteenth century, Europeans started experimenting with hot air balloons, and during the autumn of 1783 the Montgolfier brothers in France began to make the first human ascents using them. The British remained sceptical of the safety and merits of this French advance, and it took George Biggin’s Ascent in Lunardi’s Balloon to break the ice for them, an event painted here in 1785-88 by the wonderfully named Julius Caesar Ibbetson.

One of the more famous balloon flights made from Paris is shown in Jules Didier and Jacques Guiaud’s painting of the Departure of Gambetta in the Balloon ‘Armand-Barbès’ on 7 October 1870 (c 1870), during the Franco-Prussian War.

By the time the Prussians had encircled Paris, a delegation from the French government had been sent to Tours, leaving Léon Gambetta, Minister of the Interior, trapped in the city. He arranged to be flown from the foot of Montmartre in a balloon filled with coal-gas, escaping on 7 October 1870. His balloon, named Armand-Barbès, was one of over sixty being used to transport mail and carrier pigeons from and to Paris at the time, giving an idea as to how popular ballooning had become.

One of the few paintings of the following years showing ballooning is that of the Hungarian realist Pál Szinyei Merse, The Balloon from 1878.

Then in the summer of 1909, the Frenchman Louis Blériot became the first person to fly an aircraft across the Channel, from France to England.

H. Delaspre’s chromolithograph of The Channel Flight. Blériot, July 25th 1909 (1909) is one of the better prints produced at the time. The rest is aviation history.

In tomorrow’s article, I’ll consider divine flight.