The (Great) Tower of Babel

Bruegel has given remarkable consideration to the colouring of the tower. At the top, the bricks are still bright red, but in the lower levels they have weathered and become lighter in colour.

This subtlety of detail is also visible in the artist’s depiction of the human activity around the enormous tower. Bruegel has painted more than a thousand people. On the left at the foot of the tower men can be seen carrying sacks filled with lime, used for making mortar, to the top of the tower, hence the white strip going up the tower. To the left of it is a red strip, which marks the passage by which bricks were hoisted up the tower.

A procession can be seen on the third level of the tower, passing by an arch in the form of a church window. Below the procession, knights on horseback are climbing the tower. There is also a great multitude of small human figures in the harbor beneath the tower.

The story of the Tower of Babel is told in the book of Genesis, chapter 11, verses 1-9. Babel, a city in the land of Shinar, was the first city built by the descendants of Noah after the Great Flood. Their leader, Nimrod, planned to build a tower of bricks and lime that would reach to the heavens. He was conceited and acted against God’s will. God condemned these ambitious, vain plans and confounded the construction. He changed what was once a nation with one language into numerous peoples that were spread across the face of the earth, each speaking a different language. From then on the different peoples lived in a ‘confusion of tongues’.

The story of the Tower of Babel contains a universal message. The biblical construction of the tower symbolises man’s ambition to attain the highest possible goal. It also symbolises the eternal struggle between mankind’s ambition and his hubris, which is mercilessly punished by God. Mankind blindly trusts his own capabilities and the unbridled possibilities of technology. God’s punishment of this arrogance symbolises man’s insignificance and mortality. Bruegel too is somewhat vain in his attempt to paint the tower that was designed to reach to the heavens, thus reinforcing the message of the story. In Bruegel’s depiction of ‘The Tower of Babel’, God’s punishment has not yet been enacted: the bricks are still being carried up the tower and the harbour below is a hive of activity.

Bruegel made ‘The Tower of Babel’ around 1560 when he was approximately 35 years old. He visited Rome and took inspiration from the Colosseum for the tower’s architecture. Towards the top of the building, however, the arches take on the more pointed form found in Gothic cathedrals.

The Tower of Babel was a popular theme in the 16th century, especially in Antwerp, where Bruegel worked. Antwerp was a busy harbour city, visited by ships from all over the world and numerous languages could be heard on its streets. This made the Old Testament story of the confusion of tongues all the more relevant. Bruegel painted two other versions of the ‘Tower of Babel’. One is in the Kunsthistorisch Museum in Vienna. The painting is smaller than the version in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and the construction of the tower is depicted at an earlier stage. The other version is a miniature painted on a piece of ivory. The whereabouts of the latter work are unknown.