Peter Bruegel's The Fall of Icarus—his only painting with a mythological subject—has long been seen as an allegory: Charles de Tolnay has shown how Bruegel took the details which he found in Ovid and used them, contrary to the accepted tradition of his time, to contrast the futility of Icarus' venture with the solid worth of the peasant labourer's life. Ovid, like Bruegel's contemporaries (for the most part), emphasized the wonder and novelty of the flight: the people in his landscape stopped in the middle of their tasks to wonder at the god-like beings who flew so effortlessly above them:
hos aliquis tremula dum captat harundine pisces aut pastor baculo stivave innixus arator vidit et obstipuit, quique aethera carpere possent credidit esse deos.