The Tower of Babel (Bruegel)

The (Great) Tower of Babel
Artist	Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Year	c. 1563
Medium	oil on wood panel
Dimensions	114 cm × 155 cm (45 in × 61 in)
Location	Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

The (Little) Tower of Babel
Artist	Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Year	c. 1563
Medium	oil on wood panel
Dimensions	60 cm × 74.5 cm (24 in × 29.3 in)
Location	Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

The Tower of Babel was the subject of three paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The first, a miniature painted on ivory, was painted while Bruegel was in Rome and is now lost.^[1][2] The two surviving paintings, often distinguished by the prefix "Great" and "Little", are in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam respectively. Both are oil paintings on wood panels.

The Rotterdam painting is about half the size of the Vienna one. In broad terms they have exactly the same composition, but at a detailed level everything is different, whether in the architecture of the tower or in the sky and the landscape around the tower. The Vienna version has a group in the foreground, with the main figure presumably Nimrod, who was believed to have ordered the construction of the tower,^[3] although the Bible does not actually say this. In Vienna the tower rises at the edge of a large city, but the Rotterdam tower is in open countryside.

The paintings depict the construction of the Tower of Babel, which, according to the Book of Genesis in the Bible, was built by a unified, monolingual humanity as a mark of their achievement and to prevent them from scattering: "Then they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.'" (Genesis 11:4).