Bruegel's Tower of Babel, painted in 1563, shows human pride at work. A king and his builders raise a Roman-looking tower toward the clouds, at a moment when God has not yet stepped in. Three details carry the meaning: the king in the corner, the arches borrowed from the Colosseum, and a base still unfinished under the weight above it.
Genesis tells the story in a few lines. People who spoke one language settled on a plain and decided to build a city and a tower with its top in the sky. God confused their speech, and they scattered.
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The Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder made the picture, and it hangs today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The Bible gave him a tower and a crowd of builders and nothing more, so he had to decide who gives the orders, what the workers look like and how far the work has got.
The king in the lower left corner
Pride needs a proud man, and the story of the tower names none. The builders are only "they." Genesis does mention Nimrod earlier, as a mighty hunter whose kingdom began with Babel, and later tradition made him the builder of the tower.
Bruegel paints Nimrod at the lower left of the panel, arriving with his court. In front of him, on a block of stone, the painter signed and dated the picture. Behind the king the tower rises so high that the Flemish-style port city beside it looks tiny, and that port gives the viewer a sense of scale.
The workers have a place in the picture too. Bruegel sets their dwellings into the stone of the outer wall, so they live inside the thing they are building.
I read that as the point of the picture. The king started the building, but it has grown far bigger than the man who ordered it. The arches rising behind him have no source in Genesis at all. They come from Rome.
What You'll Discover
Why a Roman amphitheater stands in Babel.
Why the base of the tower is unfinished.
What a saw did to the panel.
Why Bruegel painted a second tower.