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Europe 1300 - 1800
Course: Europe 1300 - 1800 > Unit 6
Lesson 5: Antwerp, Bruges and Brussels- David, the Virgin and Child with Saints and Donor
- Gossaert, Saint Luke Painting the Madonna
- Van Orley and de Pannemaker, The Last Supper
- Pieter Aertsen, Meat Stall
- Bruegel, the Dutch Proverbs
- Bruegel, Tower of Babel
- Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow (Winter)
- Bruegel, Hunters in the Snow (Winter)
- Bruegel, Hunters in the Snow
- Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peasant Wedding
- Reliquary bust of a companion of Saint Ursula
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Bruegel, Tower of Babel
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563, oil on panel, 114 × 155 cm (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). In the Google Art Project: http://www.googleartproject.com/collection/kunsthistorisches-museum-vienna-museum-of-fine-arts/artwork/the-tower-of-babel-pieter-bruegel-the-elder/807533/. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- Is this a painting of a real building?(6 votes)
- That is a depiction of the 'Tower of Babel' as told in chapters 10 and 11 of Genesis in the Bible. Here is a Wikipedia article that explains historical buildings that my have been similar to this one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel(8 votes)
- in the painting the tower seems to have it's floor at a very high slant is this just me or was this on purpose or an accident?(2 votes)
- This is intentional: the tower, being built by man, isn't planned well. As you can see, it's already crumbling and falling into ruin during the construction too.(3 votes)
- That detail is phenomenal. How long did it take to paint this? Was it commissioned? It would seem strange that someone with the wealth to commission a work of art like this would be incline to support the apparent message.(2 votes)
- Hello,
This Wikipedia article might give you some insight:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_of_Babel_%28Bruegel%29(3 votes)
Video transcript
BETH HARRIS: We're in the
Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and we're looking
at Bruegel's amazing painting, "The Tower of Babel." STEVEN ZUCKER: I really
love this painting. BETH HARRIS: Me too. STEVEN ZUCKER: It's just
there's so much to look at, and it reminds you that before
movies, before video, paintings could be incredibly
entertaining. And here's an
image that gives us so many little narratives,
so many things to look at. BETH HARRIS: It really
does reward close, prolonged looking. STEVEN ZUCKER: So this
story comes from the Bible. Man decided to build
a building that would be so high that it
would reach into the heavens. It would reach god. BETH HARRIS: And God
didn't like that. STEVEN ZUCKER: No, not one bit. So the way that God
took care of this was sort of wonderful
and elegant. Humanity had been one
people up to this time. But God said, now he would
divide man by language so that when these men
could no longer communicate with each other the
building couldn't be built. But Bruegel is painting
this now in the Renaissance, and there's a different
set of meanings. Yes, the Bible is
the underlying story, but there's the
politics of his era. BETH HARRIS: When we think
about the Renaissance it's hard not to think about
the massive building campaigns. Bruegel himself is living in
Antwerp, an incredibly wealthy city that trades
in luxury goods. STEVEN ZUCKER: So
in some ways this is about the dangers
of man's success. BETH HARRIS: All the
things that we build, all the things that we
create, all of the power and wealth that we have is
really nothing before God. STEVEN ZUCKER: I think Bruegel
makes that point rather nicely in the lower left corner
of the painting where you see a king who is presumably
the man who is ordering the building of this monument. And you see the workers who are
actually carving stone but also bowing down to him. BETH HARRIS: There's
a kind of irony there because as the
workers bow down to him we knows that this tower that
they're building at his request is going to utterly fail. And in fact, it is failing
right before our eyes and before theirs, if only
they would notice it too. STEVEN ZUCKER: You
mean even as it's being built it's so large
that it's also falling apart. In fact, the whole
tower, although it seems so massive and so
solid, is leaning to the left slightly. And it seems to
be almost menacing the medieval city
that's just beyond it. BETH HARRIS: There
are some places where it seems very unfinished. I mean, if we look at the
center there's uncut rock, and then in other areas
it looks completed. And in other areas
there's scaffolding. There's this sense that
it's rising and falling simultaneously. STEVEN ZUCKER: You
know, the whole thing really looks believable. You see winches and cranes. BETH HARRIS: Hoists. STEVEN ZUCKER: And sort
of the basic construct itself seems to be loosely
based on the Colosseum in Rome, which
Bruegel would have seen when he visited that city. And so the whole thing really
does seem as if it's possible, and there is the sense that
here in the Renaissance man has become so capable, and
what are the dangers of that? And it is an issue that,
even in the modern era, we still grapple with. If you read science
fiction it's always the robots and the computers
that are the threat. Right? And in a sense this
is an older take on technologies that were
perhaps too big for us. BETH HARRIS: Men look
like ants everywhere here. STEVEN ZUCKER: You
get a sense of trade. You have a sense of
materials coming from afar in the ships on
the extreme right. You see a large castle,
but it's completely dwarfed by the massiveness
of the tower itself. BETH HARRIS: There's a total
sense of futility here. Everyone is doing something. Everyone is building,
or carrying, or carving, or climbing, or doing
something to make this happen. And yet as they're so busy we
know that it's all for not. And so there's a sense
of the complete futility of human endeavor. STEVEN ZUCKER: And even while we
know that futility is central, there's still an absolute
love of the investigation of the building itself. BETH HARRIS: We really have
Bruegel the architect here. The tower is so fun. We want to go into it. We can see through it, and
into the arches and spaces and windows, and we want to
know what it's like inside. It's a dream like space that
is incredibly seductive. STEVEN ZUCKER: So in a sense
it's a kind of entrapment. Bruegel is giving us
this wonderful, seductive environment. And then he's telling you,
you don't want to do this. This isn't all right. BETH HARRIS: It seduces
us and entraps us. And it's really difficult to
pull your eyes away from it.