The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel

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This Painting Confused Everyone | The Tower of Babel

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The Tower of Babel, 1563 | Stretched Canvas | Art.com | 12x16 in
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This piece is called The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. This hyper-detailed painting leaves little to the imagination. But maybe you’re still wondering what is going on here.

Once upon a time in the far away land of Babylon, people decided to build a tower so tall, it would reach to the heavens. They wanted to be more like God. But God didn’t really like this at all and decided to turn their glorious tower into a crumbly lump. So God muddled their language so no one could understand each other. And this is how languages began and how this structure got the name The Tower of Babel.

This story is clearly rooted in a Christian perspective but is also based on Flavius Josephus’s Book Antiquities of the Jews that goes on to say that King Nimrod, the man to the left of the painting, was the visionary behind the construction of the tower of Babel. In fact, it’s believed that King Nimrod, dressed in Renaissance fashion, could be inspired by King Philip II. Both King’s had big plans that were destined to fail. While Nimrod’s tower was disrupted by the introduction of languages, Philip never learned to speak the languages of those in Antwerp in the first place, which only exacerbated religious tensions.

It’s possible that this painting is drawing a comparison between Babylon and Antwerp, the place the artist lived when he created this painting. Bruegel’s depiction of The Tower of Babel resembles the Colosseum in Rome, which may mean that he was drawing a comparison between Rome and Babylon.


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The Tower of Babel (Bruegel)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The (Great) Tower of Babel

Artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Year c. 1563
Medium oil on wood panel
Dimensions 114 cm ; 155 cm (45 in ; 61 in)
Location Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
The (Little) Tower of Babel

Artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Year c. 1563
Medium oil on wood panel
Dimensions 60 cm ; 74.5 cm (24 in ; 29.3 in)
Location Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

The Tower of Babel was the subject of two surviving paintings and one lost painting by Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The earliest of the three, a miniature painted on ivory, was completed in 1552–1553 while Bruegel was in Rome, and is now lost.[1][2] The two surviving works are oil paintings on wood panels, sometimes distinguished by the prefix "Great" and "Little" and by their present location: Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien in Vienna and the latter in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. The Tower of Babel in Vienna is dated 1563, while the version in Rotterdam is undated but widely believed to have been painted sometime after.[3]

The paintings depict the construction of the Tower of Babel, which, according to the Book of Genesis in the Bible, was built by a unified, monolingual humanity as a mark of their achievement and to prevent their dispersion: "Then they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.'"[4] God punishes the builders for their vanity by "confusing their speech" into different languages so that they could no longer communicate; however, in both paintings, Bruegel focuses on the construction of the tower rather than the biblical story as a whole.[5]

The (Little) Tower of Babel in Rotterdam is painted on a canvas of half the width and half the height of The (Great) Tower of Babel in Vienna. The two paintings share the same composition, and modern X-rays reveal that the Tower in Rotterdam initially resembled the one in Vienna even more closely. However, the two paintings differ greatly in specific details, including the architectural style of the towers, the color palette and hues, the progress of the tower's construction, and the human figures in the scene.[3] Most notably, the Vienna version has a group in the foreground, with the main figure presumably Nimrod, who was believed in some Christian traditions to have ordered the construction of the tower.[6]

Bruegel's composition of the Tower of Babel, particularly in the Vienna version, is considered the most famous and widely emulated depiction;[7] both paintings are regarded as among his best works,[3] and are considered exemplars of his characteristically painstaking and "encyclopedic" attention to detail.[3][7]

Description and analysis
Bruegel's depiction of the architecture of the tower, with its numerous arches and other examples of Roman engineering, is deliberately reminiscent of the Roman Colosseum,[8] which Christians of the time saw as a symbol of both hubris and persecution. Bruegel had visited Rome in 1552–1553. Back in Antwerp, he may have refreshed his memory of Rome with a series of engravings of the principal landmarks of the city made by the publisher of his own prints, Hieronymous Cock, for he incorporated details of Cock's engravings of Roman views in both surviving versions of the Tower of Babel.

The parallel of Rome and Babylon had a particular significance for Bruegel's contemporaries: Rome was the Eternal City, intended by the Caesars to last forever, and its decay and ruin were taken to symbolize the vanity and transience of earthly efforts.[6] The Tower was also symbolic of the religious turmoil between the Catholic Church (which at the time conducted all services in Latin) and the polyglot Protestant religion that was increasingly popular in the Netherlands. The subject may have had a specific topicality, as the famous Polyglot Bible in six languages, a landmark in Biblical scholarship, was published in Antwerp in 1566.[9] Although at first glance the tower appears to be a stable series of concentric pillars, upon closer examination it is apparent that none of the layers lies at a true horizontal. Rather the tower is built as an ascending spiral.

The workers in the painting have built the arches perpendicular to the slanted ground, thereby making them unstable, and a few arches can already be seen crumbling. The foundation and bottom layers of the tower had not been completed before the higher layers were constructed.


Van Valckenborch's Tower of Babel 1594
Lucas van Valckenborch, a contemporary of Bruegel's, also painted the Tower of Babel in the 1560s and later in his career, possibly after seeing Bruegel's depiction.[6] Both were part of a larger tradition of painting the tower during the 16th and 17th centuries.[10]


Detail at right side, with original rock formation.
The story of the Tower of Babel—like that in The Suicide of Saul, Bruegel's only other painting with an Old Testament subject—was interpreted as an example of pride punished, and that is no doubt what Bruegel intended his painting to illustrate.[11] Moreover, the hectic activity of the engineers, masons and workmen points to a second moral: the futility of much human endeavour. Nimrod's doomed building was used to illustrate this meaning in Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools.[12] Bruegel's knowledge of building procedures and techniques is considerable and correct in detail. The skill with which he has shown these activities recalls that his last commission, left unfinished at his death, was for a series of documentary paintings recording the digging of a canal linking Brussels and Antwerp.[13]

Both towers are shown partly built with stone facings over a massive brick framework, a typical technique in Roman architecture, used in the Colosseum and other huge Roman buildings. Grand and formal architecture of this sort is not a usual interest of Bruegel in either paintings or drawings, although it was typical subject matter for many of his contemporaries.[14] Nadine Orenstein, in discussing his only known drawing of buildings in Rome, concludes from the details taken from the Colosseum in both Tower paintings that he "must" have recorded them in drawings on his visit ten years before, but given the easy availability of prints this does not seem conclusive.[15]

There are no surviving drawings that are studies for this or any other of Bruegel's paintings. This is despite indications that Bruegel did make use of preparatory studies. Both Tower versions are full of the type of details which are likely to have been worked out in sketches first.[16] Except for a lack of mountains, the paintings contain the main ingredients of the world landscape, a type of composition followed in many of Bruegel's earlier landscapes. The Vienna tower is built around a very steep small mountain, which can be seen protruding from the architecture at the centre near the ground and to the right higher up.

Provenance
On the Vienna painting, there is a stone block directly in front of the king which is signed and dated "Brvegel. FE. M.CCCCC.LXIII" (where Bruegel FE. is short for "Bruegel a fait en", French for "[painted] by Bruegel, in [1563]").[17] It was painted for the Antwerp banker Nicolaes Jonghelinck, one of Bruegel's best patrons, who owned no fewer than 16 of his paintings.[18][19]

The Tower in Rotterdam is believed to have once been signed and dated but may have been cropped; most scholars believe that it was painted after the version in Vienna, on or after 1563.[3]

Gallery of details (Vienna version)
Print of the Colosseum in Rome, published by Hieronymus Cock in 1551
Print of the Colosseum in Rome, published by Hieronymus Cock in 1551
 
The king and entourage visiting the builders. Bruegel's signature at bottom right.
The king and entourage visiting the builders. Bruegel's signature at bottom right.
 
The peak above the clouds
The peak above the clouds
 
Sillouetted bricklayers at the top level
Sillouetted bricklayers at the top level
 
A crane
A crane
 
Vault with falsework
Vault with falsework
In popular culture
Artist Lothar Osterburg created a series of works influenced by The Tower of Babel under the title "Babel" (2015–7), which include photogravures, a stop-motion video, and a 28-foot sculpture installation built entirely from old books.[20][21]

External videos
video icon Bruegel's Tower of Babel, Smarthistory[22]
video icon The "Little" Tower of Babel, ARTtube[23] Dutch language
See also
List of paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Tower of Babel
Tower of Babel (M. C. Escher)
References
 Orenstein, 6, one of the works belonging to Giulio Clovio
 Morra, Joanne (2007). "Utopia Lost: Allegory, Ruins and Pieter Bruegel's Towers of Babel". Art History. 30 (2): 200. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8365.2007.00538.x.
 "The Tower of Babel". www.bruegel2018.at. Retrieved 2024-09-16.
 Genesis 11:4.
 "The Tower of Babel". Google Arts & Culture. Retrieved 2024-09-16.
 "The Tower of Babel". Art and the Bible. Retrieved July 15, 2011.
 "The Tower of Babel". www.khm.at. Retrieved 2024-09-16.
 Malam, John (1999). Pieter Bruegel. Carolrhoda Books. pp. 15. ISBN 1-57505-366-7.
 Snyder, 502
 West, Andrew. "72 More Views of the Tower of Babel". BabelStone. Archived from the original on July 26, 2011. Retrieved July 15, 2011.
 Orenstein, 58
 This book's online text may be viewed at The Ship of Fools, Project Gutenberg. See also article by N. Collins, on Encyclopedia of Art Education Accessed 4 February 2012
 P. Allegretti, ibid.
 Snyder, 502; Orenstein, 96-97
 Orenstein, 96-97; see this British Museum page for another drawing of Roman ruins, perhaps the Colosseum, recently attributed to Bruegel
 Orenstein, 30-31
 Mohen, Jean-Pierre (1999). Sciences du patrimoine (Les): Identifier, conserver, restaurer. Odile Jacob. p. 13. ISBN 2-7381-0660-9. Retrieved 10 April 2020.
 Orenstein, 8
 "KHM Bilddatenbank". Archived from the original on November 3, 2012. Retrieved 2011-09-01.
 Cotter, Holland. "10 Galleries to Visit on the Lower East Side," The New York Times, April 16, 2015, p. C34. Retrieved August 10, 2020.
 Emba, Christine. "Critic's Notebook," The New Criterion, March 23, 2015. Retrieved August 10, 2020.
 "Bruegel's Tower of Babel". Smarthistory at Khan Academy. Archived from the original on November 6, 2014. Retrieved March 12, 2013.
 "The "Little" Tower of Babel". ARTtube. Archived from the original on July 23, 2013. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
Sources
Orenstein, Nadine M., ed. (2001). Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 9780870999901. (full text free online)
Snyder, James. Northern Renaissance Art, 1985, Harry N. Abrams, ISBN 0136235964
External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
The Tower at the KHM
The "Little" Tower of Babel at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Archived 2013-07-12 at the Wayback Machine
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Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Authority control databases Edit this at Wikidata
Categories: 1560s paintingsPaintings in the Kunsthistorisches MuseumPaintings in the Museum Boijmans Van BeuningenPaintings of Book of Genesis peoplePaintings by Pieter Bruegel the ElderArchitecture paintingsTower of Babel in art1563 paintingsNimrodLost paintingsColosseumOil on panel paintings

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What You Need to Know About the Tower of Babel: Genesis Bible Study | Pastor Allen Nolan Sermon

Pastor Allen Nolan
Jul 5, 2024  Pastor Allen Nolan Sermon Podcast
Pastor Allen Nolan dives deep into the topic of the mysterious Tower of Babel. Why is this short story mentioned in Genesis so captivating? What can we as Christians today learn from this story in Genesis? Join Pastor Allen for this look at the Tower of Babel and find out! This series of sermons on the Tower of Babel from Pastor Allen Nolan are taken from his series on the Book of Genesis.
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Welcome to the Cornerstone Fellowship with Pastor Allen Nolan YouTube channel! It’s all about Jesus! On our channel, you’ll learn about the Bible, faith, and practical Christian living from Pastor Allen biblically based sermons. We cover topics such as the end times, angels & demons, Jesus and his role in our lives, Christianity vs. other faith traditions and many other in-depth studies of Scripture!



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The Tower of Babel: Biblical Archaeology

InspiringPhilosophy

Nov 6, 2020  #Babylon #Ancient #Christianity
Did the Tower of Babel exist or was it just a myth made up by Jewish authors centuries later?


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Some Very Compelling Evidence the Tower of Babel Was Real

Smithsonian Channel
 views  Apr 21, 2017
Biblical scholars have long debated whether the Tower of Babel really existed. Now, a remarkable stone tablet never before shown on film appears to settle that question.

From the Series: Secrets: Tower of Babel