‘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.
Martin Gayford
All together now | 18 October 2018
The only drawback of this Kunsthistorisches Museum exhibition in Vienna is that there is too much to take in
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