Busytown

One of the central pieces of the impressive Pieter Bruegel exhibition in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum is the Tower of Babel (1563). In the painting, a gigantic, high-rise, half-finished zikkurat rises into the sky. Hundreds of small construction workers bustle around it, and in the foreground, the ambitious king is just visiting the construction site. The king, identified by Josephus Flavius (1.4) with the pagan Nimrod, Noah’s grandson, apparently pays much more attention to humiliating the construction workers than to the construction, to which he turns his back, so he does not see the enormous storm in the sky, which will soon ruin the tower. At the first sight, the picture thus represents that moralizing genre, in which Bruegel created so many pictures and with so much invention, the world of the illustrated proverbs and moral truths: he who flies high falls deep, and he who humiliates others will be humiliated.

The king visiting the construction site. Below: the signature of Bruegel on the stone to the right, and exactly above it, at the base of the tower, a small figure who “shits on it all”.

Another, political interpretation of the image is also widespread in the literature. According to this, in the context of the Catholic-Protestant opposition and Hapsburg expansion in the Netherlands, the tower – whose structure was taken by Bruegel from Hieronymus Cock’s Colosseum engraving of 1551, and from his own drawings of the Colosseum made during his Italian travel – alludes to Rome and the Roman church, while the king humiliating the workers, Philip II and the Spanish repression in the Netherlands. The hidden condemnation of Rome and Spain is not uncommon in Bruegel’s other paintings either. In the Massacre of the Innocents (1565), for example, Spanish mercenaries are doing the executioner’s job in a Flemish village. And after his death (1569), one of his major patrons, Abraham Ortelius, the great cartographer of Antwerp, explicitly advised his widow “to burn his anti-Spanish paintings”.

Hieronymus Cock, The Colosseum, 1551

Pieter Bruegel, The Massacre of the Innocents, 1565-67

However, the most elaborated line in the picture is what you can hardly on reproductions, only in front of the original picture. This is the multitude of the tiny construction scenes that make the tower rise to the sky. Ships lay the building material on the beach, people carry stones on handbarrow, wagon and ladder, scaffolds are built, strange elevating machines are turned, clothes are dried and lunch cooked. The whole tower is a well-coordinated construction site, apparently before the confusion of the languages.

All this fits to Bruegel’s two characteristic compositional methods. One is that the actual subject of the picture is represented somewhere in a secondary place, in the side, in the back, almost hidden, like the legs of Ikarus drowning in the water in the Fall of Icarus. The other is encyclopedicism: that he passionately collects all the examples of a subject, such as in Children’s Games or in the Netherlandish Proverbs. In the Tower of Babel, in the background, on the walls of the tower, where only the attentive observer sees it, he creates a veritable catalog of building industry. From this single picture one could reconstruct the methods and logistics of 16th-century Netherlandish construction.

In 1563, Antwerp was the fastest growing city in Europe, enriching and expanding at an incredible speed. Bruegel daily encountered the building procedures represented in the Tower of Babel, and he supposedly collected them in sketches, according to his usual method, in order to assemble them in a great composition. Thus, this hidden dimension of the painting at the same time documents the enrichment of Antwerp – the city in the shadow of the tower –, and, in the context of the moral message of the picture, it warns of the danger of rapid enrichment:

“The merchants who became rich from her, will stand at a distance because of the fear of her torment, weeping and mourning: “Woe, woe, that great city, she who was clothed in fine linen and purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones, and pearls! For in one hour such great wealth has been laid waste!” (Rev 18:15-17)

In Antwerp, this catastrophe occurred on 4 November 1576, in the first act of the Spanish-Dutch Eighty Years’ War. Fortunately, Bruegel did not have to live it.

The exhibition is completely captivating. When coming out, we even see Bruegel in the window of the opposite travel agency.