Art Reproductions The \Little\`` Tower of Babel``, 1563 by Pieter Bruegel The Elder (1525-1569, Belgium) | WahooArt.com

Pieter Bruegel The Elder (i) - Oil On Panel (i) - 60 x 74 cm - 1563 - (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam, Netherlands)) (i) The "Little" Tower of Babel, c. 1563, is in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. They depict the construction of the Tower of Babel, which according to the Book of Genesis in the Bible was a tower built by a unified, mono-lingual humanity as a mark of their achievement. Bruegel's depiction of the architecture of the tower, with its numerous arches and other examples of Roman engineering, is deliberately reminiscent of the Roman Colosseum, which Christians of the time saw as both a symbol of hubris and of persecution. Bruegel's paintings seem 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 had not been completed before the higher layers were constructed.