# Tower of Babel. Bruegel and his successors

Pieter Bruegel's paintings of the Tower of Babel are impressive by their sense of details; one can probably spend one whole day exploring the multitude of scenes populating the canvas...
But Bruegel's paintings also acquired the status of paradigm in the Tower's representations. After him, painters from the XVIth and XVIIth centuries -and even later- continued to paint the biblical edifice with similar compositions.
Something peculiar in Bruegel and later, van Valckenborch's paintings is that the Tower seems to be based on a mountain as some pieces of rock emerge from it. The Tower seen that way would have not been an addition of material but rather a monumental sculpture of a mountain...

For this article I chose five of them but several dozens of them can be seen by following this link.

I also already wrote about the Tower of Babel and Kafka's poetical hypothesis that the Great Wall of China had been designed to be its foundation: read the article

Read the Chapter 11 of the Book of Genesis in the Bible narrating the Tower of Babel's story.

Pieter Bruegel 1563

Pieter Bruegel 1563 (detail)

Pieter Bruegel 1563 (detail)

Hendrick Van Cleve 1580

Lucas van Valckenborch 1594

Lucas van Valckenborch 1594 (detail)

Dutch school (XVIIth century)

Marten van Valckenborch around 1600

Tobias Verhaecht around 1600

Tobias Verhaecht around 1600 (detail)