Small tower of Babel
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| Small tower of Babel |
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| Pieter Bruegel the Elder , around 1563 |
| oil on wood |
| 60 × 74.5 cm |
| Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum |
The Small Tower of Babel is a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder from around 1563 in the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. The theme is the Tower of Babel described in the First Book of Moses . It is an oil painting on wood with the dimensions 60 × 74.5 cm. A second version, dated 1563, is the Great Tower of Babel in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna.
The paintings
Structure and content
The viewer looks from a hill at a huge tower construction site in a polder landscape . The construction site has its own port at an estuary or a bay with an island in front of it and towers over clouds that are already low. At the base of the tower, secured by a gate structure, rises a ramp, which then spirals upwards. Numerous construction huts have been erected on it and construction machinery such as pedal cranes are in use. Like most people, these are tiny and can only be seen on closer inspection. The construction is more advanced than its counterpart The Great Tower in Vienna. Like the latter, it leans to the left, as the builders have placed the verticals of the floors at right angles on the ramp.
gallery
Gate structure
Construction hut in the clouds
Offshore island
interpretation
The theme is the Tower of Babel described in the First Book of Moses:
“And they said, Come on, let us build a city and a tower for ourselves, and its top up to the sky! This is how we want to make a name for ourselves so that we don't scatter over the entire surface of the earth! And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of men were building. And the LORD said, Behold, they are one people, and they all have one language, and this is only the beginning of what they do. Now nothing will be impossible for them what they think of doing. Up, let's go down there and confuse their language that they can't understand one another's language! And from there the LORD scattered them over all the earth; and they stopped building the city. That is why they gave her the name of Babel; for there the Lord confused the language of all the earth, and from there the Lord scattered it over all the earth. "
Bruegel sets the biblical events in his time and home - so his tower is in a Dutch polder landscape and the builders use the techniques of the 16th century. On the horizon line, just below the center of the picture, a church procession pulls up the ramp under a red canopy. This means that the Church is not immune from pride either.
Individual evidence
- ^ Christian Vöhringer: Pieter Bruegel. 1525 / 30-1569. Tandem Verlag, 2007 (hfullmann imprint), ISBN 978-3-8331-3852-2 , p. 73 (construction progress).
- ↑ See also the comments by Klaus Demus on the Viennese version: The Tower of Babel in Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Ä. in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna. Ed. Wilfried Seipel. skira editore, Milano 2008, ISBN 978-3-85497-133-7 , p. 56f.
- ^ Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen: Pieter Bruegel the Elder Ä. - around 1525–1569. Peasants, fools and demons. Benedikt Taschen Verlag, Cologne 1999, ISBN 3-8228-6590-7 , p. 20 (The procession).
Web links
Old peasant woman | The Adoration of the Magi (Bruegel, 1564) | The Adoration of the Magi (Bruegel, around 1556) | The Adoration of the Magi in the Snow | The country wedding | The peasant dance | The conversion of Paul | The Bethlehemite Child Murder | The fall of the blind | Christ and the Apostles at the Sea of Galilee | Christ and the adulteress | The three soldiers | The gloomy day | The magpie on the gallows | River landscape with a sower | The yawn (?) | Great Tower of Babel | The port of Naples | The return of the flock | The haymaking | The wedding dance | The hunters in the snow | The battle between carnival and fasting | The children's games | Little Tower of Babel | The grain harvest | Christ Carrying the Cross | The cripples | Landscape with the Flight into Egypt | Landscape with the fall of Icarus (?) | Seascape with a burning city (?) | The misanthrope | The nest ejector | The Dutch proverbs | The sermon of John the Baptist | The land of milk and honey | Saul's suicide | The fall of the rebelling angels | Death of the virgin | The great Grete | The triumph of death | The Bethlehem Census | The wine for the feast of St. Martin | Winter landscape with ice skaters and bird trap | Two monkeys | Twelve Proverbs (?)
(?) Attribution controversial | Formerly attributed to Bruegel