Bruegel's 'Tower of Babel'

Symbolism

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.

Frame-filling

The colossal, monumental tower fills almost the entire painting.

A feast of details

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 harbour beneath the tower.

Click here for more dizzying details on Google Cultural Institute.

The Tower of Antwerp

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.

 

Five centuries of travels

‘The Tower of Babel’ undertook an incredible journey from the moment it left Bruegel’s workshop 450 years until it arrived in the museum in 1958. Only part of its travels can be traced. Around 1600 the painting was in the art collection of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, along with other paintings by Bruegel. Around 1620 the work was back in Antwerp.

Collector D.G. van Beuningen

It was not until 1935 that the painting resurfaced in a commercial art gallery in Paris. The Rotterdam-based art collector Daniël George van Beuningen purchased the painting a year later for the enormous sum of 120,000 guilders. ‘The Tower of Babel’ was given by his estate to the museum, together with the majority of his collection, in 1958.

Late developer as a painter

The oeuvre of Pieter Bruegel the Elder is unusual. For much of his life he devoted himself to making highly detailed drawings, which served as designs for engravings. Bruegel worked mainly in Antwerp, a flourishing centre of trade and culture, and from 1560 also in Brussels.

Bruegel began painting late in life. Initially he focussed on landscapes but later also made paintings with religious subjects. The approximately fifty paintings that Bruegel painted in the last ten years of his life, including ‘The Tower of Babel’, are of an exceptionally high quality. Bruegel died in 1569. His two sons Pieter and Jan followed in his footsteps to become renowned painters.

Prints by and after Bruegel

‘The Tower of Babel’ is the only painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, but the print room contains numerous designs for prints that were engraved by other artists.

Around 1560 Bruegel drew designs for a series of prints of the seven deadly sins. The prints were engraved around the same time by Phillips Galle and sold by the Antwerp-based publisher Hieronymus Cock. The museum owns three of Bruegel’s design drawings for this series.

The museum also owns a print after a design by Bruegel, engraved by the Austrian artist Anton Joseph von Prenner. This etching was made in the 17th century after the version of ‘The Tower of Babel’ in the Kunsthistorisch Museum in Vienna.