Icarus Transformed I

'In 1956 I was at Cumae and I have been haunted by the place ever since. I made numerous drawings of it and several oil paintings. Then in 1958 I went to Crete for the first time, and flying there, in the opposite direction from that taken by Daedalus and his son five thousand years ago, I began to become involved in that legend. Between 1958 and 1962 I produced perhaps three hundred drawings, fifteen bronzes, a group of reliefs in various media and a dozen or so paintings, all centred on that epic flight. It is the myth which to me has most relevance to our own time, when flight has released us into space and yet may kill not Icarus but everyone else' (see M. Ayrton, op. cit., pp. 88-9).