Who painted The (Great) Tower of Babel?

Pieter the Elder Bruegel painted The (Great) Tower of Babel in 1563.

What Bible passage does The (Great) Tower of Babel depict?

The (Great) Tower of Babel depicts the biblical scene from Genesis 11:1-9.

The (Great) Tower of Babel by Pieter the Elder Bruegel

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The Tower of Babel was the subject of three paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The first, a miniature painted on ivory, was painted while Bruegel was in Rome and is now lost. The two surviving paintings, often distinguished by the prefix "Great" and "Little", are in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam respectively. Both are oil paintings on wood panels.

The Rotterdam painting is about half the size of the Vienna one. In broad terms they have exactly the same composition, but at a detailed level everything is different, whether in the architecture of the tower or in the sky and the landscape around the tower. The Vienna version has a group in the foreground, with the main figure presumably Nimrod, who was believed to have ordered the construction of the tower, although the Bible does not actually say this. In Vienna the tower rises at the edge of a large city, but the Rotterdam tower is in open countryside.

The paintings depict the construction of the Tower of Babel, which, according to the Book of Genesis in the Bible, was built by a unified, monolingual humanity as a mark of their achievement and to prevent them from scattering: "Then they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.'" (Genesis 11:4).

Details

Artist: Pieter the Elder Bruegel
Created: c. 1563
Medium: oil on wood panel
Dimension: 114cm × 155cm
Passage: Genesis 11:1-9

Found in: Genesis, Genesis 11, 16th century

Genesis 11:1-9

1 The whole earth was of one language and of one speech.

2 As they traveled from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they lived there.

3 They said to one another, “Come, let’s make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar.

4 They said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top reaches to the sky, and let’s make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad on the surface of the whole earth.”

5 Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built.

6 Yahweh said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is what they begin to do. Now nothing will be withheld from them, which they intend to do.

7 Come, let’s go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

8 So Yahweh scattered them abroad from there on the surface of all the earth. They stopped building the city.

9 Therefore its name was called Babel, because there Yahweh confused the language of all the earth. From there, Yahweh scattered them abroad on the surface of all the earth.

Genesis 11:1-9 · World English Bible