This 500-year-old painting is astonishingly detailed. And its details unravel one of the most important stories ever told — the Tower of Babel.
This 500-year-old painting is astonishingly detailed.
And its details unravel one of the most important stories ever told — the Tower of Babel.
Look closer and you'll see why it was doomed to fail... 🧵
Many artists have taken on the story of the Tower of Babel.
But none have done so like the mysterious painter of the Flemish Renaissance, Pieter Bruegel the Elder...
It's just a few lines long, yet one of the Bible's most enduring lessons:
After the flood, united by one language, humanity tries to build a tower great enough to reach Heaven. So God renders their speech unintelligible to one another — work is abandoned and they are scattered.
But what exactly did the builders do wrong? Was it their hubris, reaching to the heavens "to make a name" for themselves?
Well, if we follow Bruegel's painting, we can start to understand...
The subject fascinated 16 century Flemish artists, and Bruegel painted the tower into his city, Antwerp.
Perhaps he saw hubris in his own day: Antwerp was growing fast into a powerful trading port, transformed by urban and social change.
We can see hundreds of builders, cutting stones or working treadwheel cranes to hoist them ever higher.
It seems they're happily at work — how do we know everything is about to go wrong?
For a start, the whole thing looks dangerously unstable, evidently leaning over.
And it's like it's collapsing while being built — but the workers are too caught up in the present to notice.
And while their creation already towers above the clouds, the foundations aren't even finished yet...
You might also notice the architecture is similar to Rome's Colosseum. That's no coincidence.
In Bruegel's day, the Colosseum was crumbling and overgrown with weeds...
Comparing Babylon and Rome was logical: a society grown excessively unwieldy, consumed by vacuous matters that brought it eventually to ruin.
Rome was, like the Tower of Babel, doomed from the outset.
But the real problem is revealed at the front of the painting, where we see the tower's commissioner.
According to the historian Flavius Josephus, it was the tyrannical king Nimrod who instructed it.
Notice the stonemasons kneeling before him. They're not on one knee in customary loyalty to a king, but on both knees — out of reverence.
Nimrod is being treated as a god.
And Bruegel doesn't hesitate to show us what he thinks of this behaviour...
The issue isn't just one of human hubris, of climbing so high as to anger a technologically-skeptical God.
It's that, like the misdirected worship of Nimrod, the construction effort points man in the wrong direction entirely.
They're not just building a tower. They're trying to build utopia, to reach Heaven (perfection) without the help of God.
And the larger you build such a system, the more it (or its ruler) gets worshipped like it's everything — replacing the transcendent.
No matter how many people you control or how much political will you throw at it, utopia cannot be created by man.
Try as they might, even the greatest civilizations cannot live without God...
That's a wrap!
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