Footnotes

Provenance
Private Collection, Italy

Literature
Peter Cannon-Brookes, Michael Ayrton: an Illustrated Commentary, City Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham, 1978, cat.no.154, p.89 (ill.b&w, another cast)
Michael Ayrton, Michael Ayrton: Drawings and Sculpture, Cory, Adams & Mackay, London, 1966, cat.no.116 (ill.b&w, another cast)

Exhibited
Bruton, Bruton Gallery, Michael Ayrton: Recurring Themes and Images, 28 March-2 May 1981, cat.no.20; this exhibition travelled to Penarth, National Museum of Wales, 10 May-14 June; Bristol, Peter Sands Gallery, 10 July-1 August (ill.b&w. another cast)

Daedalus at Cumae is one of the key works of the 15 bronzes Michael Aryton made on the theme of Daedalus and Icarus between 1958 and 1962. In a way it marks the beginning of his long entanglement with the myth; a memento of his first encounter with the story, at Cumae in 1956, where he discovered the ruins of the Temple of Apollo on the headland between Lake Avernus and the sea and "went into the labyrinth of Daedalus, the archetypal inventor, sculptor, technician, artificer - the first man to fly [where] in spirit I remained". Later he would go on to Crete and the ruins of Knossos itself, where the story begins, but he never forgot that initial vision – of a man exhausted after the long flight across the sea, facing the fact that his ingenuity has been successful beyond anything he could have hoped for, whilst also bringing the destruction of his son.

That combination of triumph and guilt and bone-deep exhaustion was something that Ayrton returned to several times in the years that followed, as the relationship between Daedalus and Icarus - father and son, craftsman and hero - took shape for him through his two novels, The Testament of Daedalus (1962) and The Maze Maker (1969). In both Daedalus struggles with his feelings towards his son, in many ways so totally opposed to everything he stands for. "What I make exists", he repeats in both books, before concluding that "what Icarus [made] does not - and I find it hard to forgive that there was no need for him to do more".

Yet as Daedalus at Cumae persuasively demonstrates, incomprehension and resentment are only part of the story. In Testament of Daedalus, Daedalus notes, almost in passing, that the death of Icarus "was to be expected, but from the pain of it I do not seem to recover". In later The Maze Maker, where Ayrton worked out the story of his fictional alter-ego in more depth and detail, he imagined Daedalus finally landing alone at Cumae:

I thought "Grief" and could not remember what the word meant, and was vaguely perplexed...I tried to weep for Icarus, and wept for my own weariness. I told myself that I had lost my son and was puzzled. Grief and perplexity like little squabbling half-brothers pulled and pushed at me, each urging me to play with the other...My loss, lonely, unshared, particular, pricked at me...When I look at my hands they usually comfort me. I am proud to see them, simply and adequately designed to obey my demands...When I look down at them I am secure. I know them and I know their competence...But there below the high rock my hands hung on my arms like strangers...[I] no longer believed in their abilities, nor in myself, nor in my high craft

It is one of the most powerful parts of the book, but the image is more powerful still: condensing the complexity of Daedalus' emotions into an image which resonates for anybody who has experienced bereavement with all the difficult emotions it inevitably brings, whether they know anything or nothing of the myth of Daedalus and his son. Ayrton believed passionately that all myth has this universal quality, being an expression of something basic to humanity. His own relationship with his father - crusading journalist and poet Gerald Gould, who had hoped his son would fill the role of Oxford academic which he himself had always secretly yearned for - was not an easy one, and cut short by Gould's death when his son was 15. Some of that, too, certainly found its way into Ayrton's understanding of the Daedalus/Icarus story in general, and this work in particular.

It is a considerable burden of myth, meaning and metaphor for a single, not very large, sculpture to carry - yet Daedalus at Cumae bears the weight of it lightly, insisting on nothing more from the viewer than an acknowledgement of fellowship in the experience of grief that comes to all of us sooner or later; an inevitable part of being human. Ayrton once commented that he saw his task as a sculptor to say very complicated things very simply; Daedalus at Cumae is evidence of how well he could achieve that ambition.

We are grateful to Justine Hopkins for compiling this catalogue entry.