Every town in these twelve paintings can still be found on a map. Yet almost none of them is painted exactly as it stood. A church is moved into view here, a skyline tidied there, and even the most faithful views record buildings that later collapsed or rose differently.
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How These Were Chosen
A cityscape is a painting whose subject is the town itself: its streets, walls and roofs, and the people who use them. For centuries the city stayed behind a saint or a sitter. It moved to the front when towns wanted their wealth on show.
That shift set painters a hard problem. Walls must stand straight, and the painter's position decides the rest. Seen from a tower, a town turns into a map. Seen from the street, its people get faces.
A painting stayed here only if no other city could take the place of the one it shows. Half the painters quietly moved something in the real town. The other half held on to a single hour, a season or a day.
12. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel (1563)
At the foot of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Tower of Babel, a walled port city runs down to the water, and its houses are so small that they give the tower its size. The tower itself climbs in arched tiers out of a flat country and into the clouds. Bruegel signed the oak panel on a block of stone near the bottom and dated it 1563.
That port has little to do with the Bible's geography. Genesis places Babel in Mesopotamia, where the builders say "let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven." Bruegel built the city from what he knew at home instead. Its houses, churches and walls follow the style of Brabant, the region around Antwerp and Brussels, and beyond the walls a wide river winds through farmland to the horizon.
Once the town is Flemish, the building site follows, and the whole city works for it. Boats bring materials into the harbor at the foot of the tower. Treadwheel cranes, turned by men walking inside a large wheel, hoist the stone. Under the arches still in progress stands wooden centering, the timber frame that holds an arch up until its stones lock together.
Bruegel even lets people move in before the work is done. Workers' houses are set into the outer walls of the tower, and they look built to last. Laundry dries on the tower itself, so a building nobody has finished already belongs to the town.
All of this came from Antwerp, where Bruegel worked. Like the town in the panel, Antwerp lived off trade by water, and around the time of the painting it had close to 100,000 inhabitants, counting some 10,000 people passing through. Whole new districts went up there in a few years. Bruegel gave the biblical city the cranes and the harbor of that boom.
At a Glance
Artist: Pieter Bruegel the Elder (born about 1526 to 1530, died 1569)
Painted: 1563
Medium: Oil on oak panel
Size: 114.4 × 155.5 cm (45 × 61 in)
Where to see it: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
11. Frans Post, View of Olinda, Brazil (1662)
In the foreground of Frans Post's View of Olinda, an armadillo, a sloth, an anteater, a monkey and a lizard share the undergrowth with tropical plants and fruit. Higher up, on a hill above the Brazilian landscape, stands the burned shell of a cathedral, with a small crowd gathered beside it. Someone had set that town on fire, and the painter had worked for the side that did it.