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| Artist | Pieter Bruegel the Elder |
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| Year | c. 1563 |
| Type | oil on panel |
| Dimensions | 114 cm × 155 cm (45 in × 61 in) |
| Location | Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
The Tower of Babel is the subject of two oil paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. They depict the construction of the Tower of Babel, which according to the Book of Genesis in the Bible was a tower built by a unified, mono-lingual humanity as a mark of their achievement, and to prevent them from scattering: "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.'" (Genesis 11:4).
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,[1] which Christians of the time saw as both a symbol of hubris and of persecution.
Bruegel's paintings seem to attribute the ultimate failure of the Tower to engineering difficulties rather than to sudden, divinely-caused linguistic differences.[citation needed] Although at first glance the tower appears to be stable series of concentric pillars, upon closer examination it is apparent that none of the layers lie at a true horizontal; rather, the tower is built as an ascending spiral. However, 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. More troubling perhaps is the fact that the foundation and bottom layers of the tower had not been completed before the higher layers were constructed.
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| Artist | Pieter Bruegel the Elder |
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| Year | c. 1563 |
| Type | oil on panel |
| Dimensions | 60 cm × 74.5 cm (24 in × 29 in) |
| Location | Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam |
The Tower of Babel is on display at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Another painting of the same subject, The "Little" Tower of Babel, c. 1563, is in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.
References
- ^ Malam, 15
Sources
- Malam, John. Pieter Bruegel. Carolrhoda Books, 1999. ISBN 1-5750-5366-7
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