Wings of Daedalus
The feathered wings the craftsman Daedalus built with wax and thread to escape the labyrinth of Crete with his son Icarus, the most famous image of doomed invention in Greek myth. Ovid's Metamorphoses gives the fullest telling: Daedalus warns Icarus to fly neither too low, where the sea soaks the feathers, nor too high, where the sun melts the wax, but the boy exults in flight, rises, and falls into the sea that took his name, the Icarian. The wings were the answer to King Minos' prison of the labyrinth, and their construction, each feather set in order like a real bird's wing, shows Daedalus'