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Lot Essay
Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Tower of Babel is arguably the most iconic treatment of the theme in the history of art, and clearly had a decisive impact on his artistic contemporaries and his son Pieter the Younger, who painted this ambitious, monumental panel as one of his earliest works. Bruegel’s original composition must have been greeted with immediate popularity – with a version painted by Lucas van Valckenborch as early as 1568 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich, inv. 1642) – yet the greatest contribution to its dissemination was made by Pieter the Younger. Only two versions by the son are known, with the present considered by Klaus Ertz to be the prime (loc. cit.). Another painting of similar dimensions was formerly on the Viennese art market. Pieter the Younger’s independent success as an artist in his own lifetime also ensured the survival and spread of his father’s reputation, with the majority of Bruegel the Elder’s original paintings disappearing into noble private collections, like The Tower of Babel (fig. 1), which eventually entered the collection of the Hapsburg Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) in Prague. The Younger’s reprisals of his father’s compositions fed, in turn, contemporary market demand for these subjects.
Representations of the Tower of Babel can be traced to manuscript illuminations from as early as the twelfth century, yet it is from the sixteenth century onwards that they would dramatically increase in number, variety and inventiveness. Bruegel himself painted three versions of the theme: two surviving on panel, with a larger prime of 1563 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), a smaller modified variant dated a few years later to circa 1568 (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) and a miniature painted on ivory, now lost. The present picture takes the Vienna painting as its model, which Pieter the Younger would have likely studied from life in Antwerp – a rare case among his copies of the Elder’s popular designs – before it was recorded in Rudolf II’s collection in 1604 (K. van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, Haarlem, 1604). Ertz dates the present panel to between 1585 and 1595, noting the faithfully reproduced colors in many of the motifs, which only could have been achieved through direct observation (op. cit.). This dating is supported by dendrochronological analysis of five of the six panel boards, which indicate a felling date after circa 1557, with likely usage before 1600, giving it pride of place among the earliest works in Pieter the Younger’s oeuvre (Ian Tyers, Dendrochronological Consultancy Report 509, April 2012, report available upon request).
Bruegel the Elder took his subject from Genesis 11:1-9, which recounts how God confounded the people who settled in a plain in Shinar after the Flood, seeking to build ‘a tower that reaches to the heavens’ so as to escape another such fate and ‘be scattered over the face of the whole earth’. At the lower left, Bruegel includes the Assyrian king Nimrod— ‘the mighty warrior before the Lord’ appointed to oversee the tower’s construction – and his retinue atop a plateau before whom workmen genuflect. To the right is a bustling harbor scene, balanced by a crowded cityscape to the left, with the huge spiralling tower in the center on which ant-like laborers engage in the construction. Yet unlike most representations of this subject at the time, Bruegel modified the composition and iconography to suit his purpose, including in the scene Nimrod, who did not appear in the Biblical account but was rather described in Flavius Josephus’ historiographical late first-century text Antiquities of the Jews (Book I, Chapter IV: 2-3). Josephus identified the place where Nimrod chose to build the tower as Babylon, derived from the Hebrew word babel (‘confusion’), after the confusion of languages that God caused as punishment for Nimrod’s hubris.
The ‘plateau’ composition of the landscape, in which the foreground figures are abruptly separated from the panoramic vista by a precipitous drop, represented an important development in the tradition of the Weltlandschaft (world landscape), a technique pioneered by artists like Joachim Patinir and Herri met de Bles. Drawing the eye deeper into the composition, Bruegel created an illusion of depth and distance in the two-dimensional plane through modulations of color and an orthogonal perspective.
There has been much art historical debate as to the extent of Bruegel’s allusions to contemporary events in the scene. Like his Massacre of the Innocents of circa 1565-67, the political subtext is often interpreted as an indictment of King Philip II's intense suppression of the growing minority of Calvinists and their defenders in the war-torn Low Countries of the second half of the sixteenth century. Philip’s authoritarian control of the political and commercial aspects of Flemish life through the 1560s must have appeared to Antwerp’s Reformist intellectuals as evidence of imperial haughtiness and oppression, with their deep longing for an ideal liberal community. Such tyrannical authority might have been recognized by Bruegel as a modern manifestation of the Tower of Babel and Nimrod’s extreme kingly hubris. Indeed, Bruegel appears to have set the narrative within the context of his lifetime, imagining Babylon as a contemporary Netherlandish city near a harbor of bustling activity resembling that of Antwerp itself. Bruegel’s unfinished, spiralling tower with Babylonian and Roman architectural elements ultimately derives from the superimposed arcades of the Colosseum in Rome. The artist visited the Eternal City around 1553 and equally would have known the Roman monument through prints, including a series of seven views published by Hieronymus Cock in Antwerp circa 1550 (fig. 2).
In both the Younger and Elder’s paintings, the rocky outcropping in the foreground quickly gives way to the flat, panoramic landscape. Pieter the Younger extended the distance between the foot of the tower and the surrounding woodland, which partially accounts for the considerably larger dimensions of the present painting. Despite his youth and general reliance on his father's models, in this painting Pieter the Younger reveals himself through a variety of slight deviations from the prime composition, all having been thoroughly described by Ertz (op. cit., p. 278). Infrared reflectography sheds additional light into the artist’s thought process. Typical of the young Brueghel is the detailed underdrawing, especially evident in the tower and foreground figures, which is composed of assertive, spontaneous and expressive freehand lines (fig. 3).
The present painting’s previous owner, Charles de Pauw (1920-1984), possessed one of the largest collections of paintings by the Brueghel family ever assembled, in particular those by Pieter Brueghel the Younger. After acquiring a painting by Pieter the Younger almost by accident in 1974, in the space of only ten years de Pauw went on to build a collection of forty works attributed to the artist (see V. Prat, 'L'homme aux quarante Brueghel: Les chefs-d'oeuvre secrets des grandes collections privées’, Figaro Magazine, Supplement, no. 11, 1985). Sixteen of these paintings, including the present work, featured in the 1986 sale of his collection.
Representations of the Tower of Babel can be traced to manuscript illuminations from as early as the twelfth century, yet it is from the sixteenth century onwards that they would dramatically increase in number, variety and inventiveness. Bruegel himself painted three versions of the theme: two surviving on panel, with a larger prime of 1563 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), a smaller modified variant dated a few years later to circa 1568 (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) and a miniature painted on ivory, now lost. The present picture takes the Vienna painting as its model, which Pieter the Younger would have likely studied from life in Antwerp – a rare case among his copies of the Elder’s popular designs – before it was recorded in Rudolf II’s collection in 1604 (K. van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, Haarlem, 1604). Ertz dates the present panel to between 1585 and 1595, noting the faithfully reproduced colors in many of the motifs, which only could have been achieved through direct observation (op. cit.). This dating is supported by dendrochronological analysis of five of the six panel boards, which indicate a felling date after circa 1557, with likely usage before 1600, giving it pride of place among the earliest works in Pieter the Younger’s oeuvre (Ian Tyers, Dendrochronological Consultancy Report 509, April 2012, report available upon request).
Bruegel the Elder took his subject from Genesis 11:1-9, which recounts how God confounded the people who settled in a plain in Shinar after the Flood, seeking to build ‘a tower that reaches to the heavens’ so as to escape another such fate and ‘be scattered over the face of the whole earth’. At the lower left, Bruegel includes the Assyrian king Nimrod— ‘the mighty warrior before the Lord’ appointed to oversee the tower’s construction – and his retinue atop a plateau before whom workmen genuflect. To the right is a bustling harbor scene, balanced by a crowded cityscape to the left, with the huge spiralling tower in the center on which ant-like laborers engage in the construction. Yet unlike most representations of this subject at the time, Bruegel modified the composition and iconography to suit his purpose, including in the scene Nimrod, who did not appear in the Biblical account but was rather described in Flavius Josephus’ historiographical late first-century text Antiquities of the Jews (Book I, Chapter IV: 2-3). Josephus identified the place where Nimrod chose to build the tower as Babylon, derived from the Hebrew word babel (‘confusion’), after the confusion of languages that God caused as punishment for Nimrod’s hubris.
The ‘plateau’ composition of the landscape, in which the foreground figures are abruptly separated from the panoramic vista by a precipitous drop, represented an important development in the tradition of the Weltlandschaft (world landscape), a technique pioneered by artists like Joachim Patinir and Herri met de Bles. Drawing the eye deeper into the composition, Bruegel created an illusion of depth and distance in the two-dimensional plane through modulations of color and an orthogonal perspective.
There has been much art historical debate as to the extent of Bruegel’s allusions to contemporary events in the scene. Like his Massacre of the Innocents of circa 1565-67, the political subtext is often interpreted as an indictment of King Philip II's intense suppression of the growing minority of Calvinists and their defenders in the war-torn Low Countries of the second half of the sixteenth century. Philip’s authoritarian control of the political and commercial aspects of Flemish life through the 1560s must have appeared to Antwerp’s Reformist intellectuals as evidence of imperial haughtiness and oppression, with their deep longing for an ideal liberal community. Such tyrannical authority might have been recognized by Bruegel as a modern manifestation of the Tower of Babel and Nimrod’s extreme kingly hubris. Indeed, Bruegel appears to have set the narrative within the context of his lifetime, imagining Babylon as a contemporary Netherlandish city near a harbor of bustling activity resembling that of Antwerp itself. Bruegel’s unfinished, spiralling tower with Babylonian and Roman architectural elements ultimately derives from the superimposed arcades of the Colosseum in Rome. The artist visited the Eternal City around 1553 and equally would have known the Roman monument through prints, including a series of seven views published by Hieronymus Cock in Antwerp circa 1550 (fig. 2).
In both the Younger and Elder’s paintings, the rocky outcropping in the foreground quickly gives way to the flat, panoramic landscape. Pieter the Younger extended the distance between the foot of the tower and the surrounding woodland, which partially accounts for the considerably larger dimensions of the present painting. Despite his youth and general reliance on his father's models, in this painting Pieter the Younger reveals himself through a variety of slight deviations from the prime composition, all having been thoroughly described by Ertz (op. cit., p. 278). Infrared reflectography sheds additional light into the artist’s thought process. Typical of the young Brueghel is the detailed underdrawing, especially evident in the tower and foreground figures, which is composed of assertive, spontaneous and expressive freehand lines (fig. 3).
The present painting’s previous owner, Charles de Pauw (1920-1984), possessed one of the largest collections of paintings by the Brueghel family ever assembled, in particular those by Pieter Brueghel the Younger. After acquiring a painting by Pieter the Younger almost by accident in 1974, in the space of only ten years de Pauw went on to build a collection of forty works attributed to the artist (see V. Prat, 'L'homme aux quarante Brueghel: Les chefs-d'oeuvre secrets des grandes collections privées’, Figaro Magazine, Supplement, no. 11, 1985). Sixteen of these paintings, including the present work, featured in the 1986 sale of his collection.