Source Analysis

Source Analysis

1. Part of what I like about Flemish Rennaisance painting is that often the artists see the biblical scene in terms of their own every-day life.  There are advantages to imagining a scene as it might have occurred at the time described; there are other advantages to translating that ancient story into contemporary terms.   In this painting, the tower is built next to a Dutch harbor in classic design.  You see that it has superceded the clouds, thus graphically demonstrating in ancient understanding, the reason that God should fear humankind’s intrusion into God’s doman, presenting a threat to ”the gods’ power as described in Genesis 11:1-9.   “Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

(http://bibleartists.wordpress.com/tag/little-tower-of-babel/)

2. 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,^[3] which Christians of the time saw as both a symbol of hubris and persecution. Bruegel had visited Rome in 1552-1553. Back in Antwerp, he must have refreshed his memory of Rome with a series of engravings of the principal landmarks of the city made by the publisher of his own prints, Hieronymous Cock, for he incorporated details of Cock's Roman engravings in both surviving versions of the Tower of Babel with few significant alterations.^{compare 2nd image below} The parallel of Rome and Babylon had a particular significance for Bruegel's contemporaries: Rome was the Eternal City, intended by the Caesars to last for ever, and its decay and ruin were taken to symbolize the vanity and transience of earthly efforts.^[2] The Tower was also symbolic of the turmoil between the Catholic church (which at the time did services only in Latin) and the polyglot Lutheran Protestant religion of the Netherlands.^[4] Although at first glance the tower appears to be a 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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_of_Babel_(Bruegel)

3. These were followed
by two masterpieces of 1563, the Flight into Egypt (U. London,
Courtauld Inst. Gals), which is a landscape like the Suicide of Saul,
and the Tower of Babel (Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.), the undated variant
of which (Rotterdam, Mus. Boymans–van Beuningen) is usually
thought to have been painted c. 1567–8. The theme of the Tower of
Babel does not occur on panel before Bruegel, except for a lost work
by Patinir that is said to have been in Cardinal Grimani’s palace in
Venice. Bruegel’s eerie architectural Utopia is modelled on the ruins of the Colosseum in Rome,
which he must have studied while in Italy. He conceived the vision of a Roman monstrosity, thePieter Bruegel I: Road to
Calvary, oil on panel, 1.23×1.7…
Pieter Bruegel I: Hunters in the
Snow, oil on panel,…
Pieter Bruegel I: Return of the
Herd, oil on panel,…
fearful scale of which far exceeded all architectural megalomanias of the past. The Tower of
Babylon, described in the Bible and by Josephus Flavius, symbolizes the fact that all the works of
mankind are doomed to imperfection. According to Demus, the tower could not be completed
because the hubristic design of its builders had reached the limits of possibility. Bruegel’s intent is
to make evident this frustration: the scene typifies ‘a glaring want of coordination’, ‘a muddled
conception doomed from the outset’, ‘an absurd state of helplessness before the grandiose
mockery of a nightmarish bankruptcy of reason’.

http://www.montgomerycollege.edu/~bevans/pieter%20brugel%20grove%20bio.pdf