My Kid Could Paint That

The Tower of Babel, 1563, Pieter Bruegel

By REID GUEMMER

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Structure and Paintings
Analyzing Architecture and Perspective within Paintings
Curated by Max Cantu-Lima

Peter Bruegel, Tower of Babel, 1553

Peter Bruegel has been the most influential artist on how I view art. This painting relates directly to Paul Auster's City of Glass, which we read in our AP Literature class and concerns itself with the issues of identity and purpose. The Tower of Babel plays a role in the narrative of this novel with the fall of language, stating that our language has lost its meaning. While this may be the case, Bruegel speaks with a universal language of color, inserting light blues, yellows, and reds within the painting to give it that burst of presence from the stretching horizon of green. The beauty of this painting is the chaos that takes place as these workers attempt to construct this monstrosity. The viewer could lose themselves within the minute details of Bruegel's work.

I have chosen to write over The Tower of Babel as our fourth painting as we analyze architecture because of its creativity. Bruegel produced this from his imagination. Sure he probably was inspired by the Roman Colosseum, but still, to produce this intricate world of workers that live on this building like bacteria inspires my creativity. The viewer can see the process of how the construction is taking place as most of the top is left exposed. Also the levels of the tower as they progress differ in the style of arches. What the painting attempts to instruct, in my mind, is the concept of being able working with others effectively as well as narrowing in on an idea. That no matter how great the idea is, if it's to big of an idea, your infrastructure is at risk of collapsing.

Bruegel is truly a master. Just look at how he produces the stones in the foreground and the sprawling landscape. The time he invests into getting all the details right. The coast and the ships proportionally correct. This imaginary world invites the viewer as it utilizes the majority of the canvas with interesting subjects to analyze. While it's only a two-dimensional picture, even with the paint you still feel that sensation of  "Wow." Gazing at this structure the mind still wanders off. Its nearly impossible not to think of something from this painting. The depth Bruegel is able to produce with his use of shadows brings the painting to a semi-real state of being, we begin to believe the narrative Bruegel is telling us. That's what makes him and this painting great. The fact that we can lose ourselves within it, and while all art does that to some degree, Bruegel makes it effortless.

Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel,  1563

As the story goes, Nimrod ordered the construction of the Tower of Babel as ruler of a unified, monolingual human race. The tower was meant to extend to heaven, as a symbol of what humanity could achieve. God took offense and scattered the gathered builders across the face of the earth, giving each group different languages so that they could never again work together. Scholars think the story of Babel was possibly inspired by a Mesopotamian ziggurat, the Etemenanki, which the Hebrews would have seen while captive in Babylon. Although nothing remains except ruins, it would have been 300 feet tall, roughly the height of the Statue of Liberty. Regardless of its origins, the story stands as a warning against human arrogance.

Bruegel actually painted this subject three times during his lifetime. The first, a miniature on ivory, has been lost; the version shown above is the larger of the two remaining. The other, painted last, is referred to as The "Little" Tower of Babel - this being one of the advanced distinctions art history professionals can make. Here, the tower dominates the canvas, spiraling upward in a vaguely organic fashion resembling a horn or a shell. The detailed landscape in the background marks it as a part of the Northern Renaissance. A figure, presumably Nimrod, stands in the foreground, inspecting the work. On closer inspection, the floors are not level and some of the arches are already crumbling. Workers are bickering, and the upper floors are being built before the lower are fully complete. The overall impression is of disaster before the project has even fully begun.

The architecture of Bruegel's tower resembles the Roman Colosseum, which Bruegel may have seen during his 1552 visit to Rome. For Christians of the time, Rome represented the ultimate transience and vanity: an empire that had intended to last forever but instead fell to decadence and decay. At Bruegel's time, rifts were growing within the Church. The repercussions of Martin Luther's reforms were still growing, and private worship was taking precedence over the rituals of the Church as a result of the New Devotion. Bruegel's painting serves as a warning against pride and an example of what little conflict and disunion achieves.