Artist: Pieter Bruegel The Elder
Topic: Buildings
Date: 1563
Size: 60 x 74 cm
Museum: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam, Netherlands)
Technique: Oil On Panel
The "Little" Tower of Babel, c. 1563, is in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. 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. 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, 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. 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.
Artist |
|
|---|---|
Download |
|
Permissions |
Free for non commercial use. See below. |
Pieter Bruegel The Elder – Most viewed artworks
 |
This image (or other media file) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired. However - you may not use this image for commercial purposes and you may not alter the image or remove the watermark. This applies to the United States, Canada, the European Union and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 70 years.
|
Note that a few countries have copyright terms longer than 70 years: Mexico has 100 years, Colombia has 80 years, and Guatemala and Samoa have 75 years. This image may
not be in the public domain in these countries, which moreover do not implement the
