Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca 1525-1569), The Tower of Babel, 1563, oil on oak panel, 114 x 155 cm.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

The Tower of Babel was, according to the Book of Genesis in the Bible, built by a unified, monolingual humanity as a mark of their achievement and to prevent them from scattering. The person in the foreground is likely Nimrod, king of Shinar (in present-day Iraq), said to have ordered the construction of the Tower and reputed to have become rebellious against God.

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 lies at a true horizontal. The tower is rather built as an ascending spiral, which cannot be to the benefit of its stability. A few arches can already be seen crumbling. The foundation and bottom layers of the tower had not been completed before the higher layers were constructed.

The story of the Tower of Babel was interpreted as an example of pride punished, and that is what Bruegel intended his painting to illustrate. Moreover, the hectic activity of the engineers, masons and workmen points to a second moral: the futility of much human endeavour. (Source: en.wikipedia.org)

Specifically, Bruegel’s Tower of Babel is under construction in a large and densely populated city, with a wide river and a harbour to the right, clearly the city of Antwerp. The underlying message of Bruegel was his concerns about Antwerp’s bursting business and intellectual expansion, which he had witnessed the years before moving to Brussels in 1563, where he finished the painting. Antwerp enjoyed at that time an immense influx of foreign merchants but of religious refugees as well, which in the view of the Spanish rulers was considered threatening for the promulgation of the reprehensible ideas of the Reformation, potentially getting out of hand.

For several details of the painting, see next pictures