Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 'The Tower of Babel' (1563) transfers the Old Testament story of the biblical ziggurat into a vast contemporary landscape: a sprawling city surrounds the unfinished tower, which climbs in seven spiralling tiers above the clouds like a Flemish recast of the Roman Colosseum. In the foreground the Babylonian king Nimrod inspects the works while stonemasons and carpenters toil upward — the entire structure already subtly leaning, doomed to failure even before its top is reached. The Vienna version is the largest and most ambitious of Bruegel's Babel paintings and one of the supreme achievements of 16th-century Flemish painting.

Exhibition Venue

Kunsthistorisches Museum

Vienna, Austria

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