![]() As a teenager I had on my wall a poster from the Centre Pompidou in Paris, featuring a painting by Dominique Appia of the tower as a railway interchange. Adornment is subordinated to the structural demands of the massive tower the weight of the building is palpable.īruegel made the tower into a mini-genre in Flemish art: there is a little Canary Wharf of Babels by artists including Marten van Valckenborch (1535–1612), Tobias Verhaecht (1561–1631) and Roelant Savery (1576–1639) – artists who, like Bruegel, made repeat visits to the tower. This is a paradoxically realist touch in these fantastical views. Across both, however, the architecture is distinctly crude, a blunt Romanesque of endless repeated round arches. The smaller panel, which is at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, has a larger and more architecturally finessed tower, with a more pronounced spiral ramp, one of the main impressions the imagined tower seems to trail with it. It also seems that the Vienna tower is getting some assistance from the terrain, as it appears to be constructed around a natural rock formation. The larger and more famous of the two, kept at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, depicts a slightly smaller edifice in a distinctly less complete state. Photo: © KHM-Museumsverbandīruegel painted two Towers of Babel, both in 1563. The Tower of Babel (1563), Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It is also a visible expression of a strictly hierarchical society – and a kind of broadcasting mast. Kuang’s Babel is the linchpin of the magic system of her world, which resides in a relationship between the translation of words and the working of silver. In this modern fantasy, it is relocated to an alternative Oxford, where it stands over James Gibbs’s and William Townesend’s Radcliffe Camera, from which it has drawn obvious inspiration. Hollow is a novel steeped in art history, in which the creations of Bruegel and Bosch have taken on earthy, baffling life and it shows that the biblical tower and Bruegel’s tower have become inseparable. Why there and not the plain of Shinar? Because that is where the tower is sited not by the biblical king Nimrod, but by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Brian Catling’s Hollow (2021) includes in its extraordinary imagery a ruinous Tower of Babel slowly being absorbed into the landscape it dominates, an anomalous snow-capped peak in the Low Countries. Two recent novels feature the tower in radically different guises. But, remaining forever unfinished, the Tower of Babel is a structure to which artists appear compelled to return. It is a warning, as Milton wrote, that the ‘greatest Monuments of Fame, / And Strength and Art are easily out-done / By Spirits reprobate’. It is a classic template of human pride and divine retribution, hubris written in stone and then a nemesis of division and incomprehension. Irate at this presumption – and possibly alarmed at what united humanity might get up to next – God punished the builders by confusing their language, so that they could not understand one another, terminating the project. The story from Genesis hardly needs repeating: after Noah, all humans had the same language, and many gathered on the plain of Shinar to build ‘a tower with its top in the heavens’. ![]() It may have disappeared – it may never have existed – but it continues to loom large.
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