Shop art print and framed art Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder

The Tower of Babel is the title of several paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder based on the biblical episode of the Tower of Babel. The most famous, known as The Great Tower of Babel, was painted around 1563 and is currently in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The smaller 'Little' Tower of Babel, painted around 1568, is in the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. Brueghel's description of the tower's architecture, with its many arches and other examples of Roman engineering, deliberately brings to mind the Colosseum, which for Christians of the time was a symbol of excess and persecution. Another hypothesis might be linked to the memory of the Aragonese Castle on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, which bears a strong visual resemblance to the work. Brueghel's painting seems to attribute the failure of the construction to structural engineering problems rather than to sudden linguistic differences of divine origin. Although at first glance the tower appears to be made up of a stable series of concentric cylinders, closer inspection reveals that none of the floors rests on a true "horizontal"; rather, the tower is built as an upward spiral, a circular edifice with floors of decreasing diameter. The buttresses, which frame geminated windows, become lighter and lighter. However, the arches are built perpendicular to the sloping ground, making them unstable, and some have already collapsed. Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that the foundations [...]

 

This artwork is a painting from the renaissance period. It belongs to the flemish & northern renaissance style.

 

« Tower of Babel » is kept at Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria.

 

Find the full description of Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder on Wikipedia.