Musée des Beaux Arts (poem) in the context of "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus"

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is a painting in oil on canvas measuring 73.5 by 112 centimetres (28.9 in × 44.1 in) now in the Oldmasters Museum (part of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium) in Brussels. It was long thought to be by the leading painter of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. However, following technical examinations in 1996 of the painting hanging in the Brussels museum, that attribution is regarded as very doubtful, and the painting, perhaps painted in the 1560s, is now usually seen as a good early copy by an unknown artist of Bruegel's lost original, perhaps from about 1558. According to the museum: "It is doubtful the execution is by Bruegel the Elder, but the composition can be said with certainty to be his", although recent technical research has re-opened the question.

The painting is Bruegel's only subject taken from classical mythology, and is largely derived from Ovid. It is described in W. H. Auden's famous poem "Musée des Beaux-Arts", then the name of the museum in Brussels which holds the painting, and became the subject of a poem of the same name by William Carlos Williams, as well as "Lines on Bruegel's 'Icarus'" by Michael Hamburger.