The Tower of Babel

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, c. 1563

tempera on panel, 114 × 155 cm

Kunsthistoriches Museum

The Tower of Babel is an oil painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Its subject is the construction of the Biblical Tower of Babel, a tower built by humanity to reach heaven. Download high resolution version (1061x800, 196 KB) Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Bruegels The Painter and The Connoisseur drawn c. ... Events February 1 - Sarsa Dengel succeeds his father Menas as Emperor of Ethiopia February 18 - The Duke of Guise is assassinated while besieging Orléans March - Peace of Amboise. ... A 1367 tempera on wood by Niccolò Semitecolo. ... Mona Lisa, Oil on wood panel painting by Leonardo da Vinci La Donna Velata, painted in 1516, Oil on wood panel painting by Raphael Oil painting is done on surfaces with pigment ground into a medium of oil — especially in early modern Europe, linseed oil. ... Bruegels The Painter and The Connoisseur drawn c. ... The Confusion of Tongues by Gustave Doré (1865) According to the narrative in Genesis Chapter 11 of the Bible, the Tower of Babel was a tower built by a united humanity to reach the heavens. ...

Brueghel's depiction of the architecture of the tower, with its numerous arches and other examples of Roman engineering, is deliberately reminicent of the Roman Colosseum, which Christians of the time saw as both a symbol of hubris and of persecution. This article belongs in one or more categories. ... The Colosseum in Rome, Italy: an exterior view of the best-preserved section. ...

Interestingly, Brueghel's painting seems to attribute the ultimate failure of the Tower to engineering difficulties rather than to sudden, divinely-caused linguistic differences. Although at first glance the tower appears to be stable series of concentric pillars, upon closer examination it is apparent that none of the layers lie at a true horizontal; rather, the tower is built as an ascending spiral. However, the workers in the painting have built the arches perpendicular to the slanted ground, thereby making them unstable, and a few arches can already be seen crumbling. More troubling perhaps is the fact that the foundation and bottom layers of the tower have not been completed before the higher layers were constructed. Taipei 101, the worlds tallest building as of 2004. ... The confusion of tongues (confusio linguarum) is the fragmentation of human languages after the collapse of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9). ... Isometric view of a typical arch An arch is a curved structure capable of spanning a space while supporting significant weight (e. ...

The painting was meant to demonstrate the dangers of human pride and perhaps the failure of Classical rationality in the face of the divine.

The Tower of Babel is on display at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Kunsthistorisches Museum at Maria-Theresien-Platz, Vienna. ... Vienna (German: Wien ; Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian: Beč, Czech: Vídeň, Hungarian: Bécs, Romanian: Viena, Romani: Bech or Vidnya, Russian: Вена, Slovak: Viedeň, Slovenian: Dunaj) is the capital of Austria, and also one of the nine States of Austria. ...