The Tower of Babel

Unknown painter, Bruges · c. 1490
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

One of the earliest known paintings of the Tower of Babel, and a very small one — about 20 by 18 centimetres. It was probably painted in Bruges around 1490; the painter’s name is not known.

The tower is shown just begun, a square brick building with round-arched windows, and the picture is really about building: a crane and a hoist on the top, a plank ramp, horses dragging a sled, a camel with a basket, men digging, mixing and carrying. It is a fair picture of how a building site looked in the late Middle Ages.

From the text

Bricks used for stone and tar for mortar (Genesis 11:3)

A city with a tower reaching to the heavens (Genesis 11:4)

The artist’s own

A medieval building site with a crane and a hoist

A harbour with sailing ships of the 1400s

A king in armour watching the work — by Jewish and Christian tradition Nimrod; Genesis does not name the builder

Details

The crane

A wooden crane and a tall pole with ropes lift loads to the top.

On the top

Workers lay bricks along the unfinished walls.

The king

A tall crowned figure with soldiers watches — the builder of tradition.

A camel with a basket

Animals carry and drag materials across the yard.

Ships

A harbour behind the tower, with ships of the painter’s own day.

Anonymous painter, possibly Bruges. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (SK-A-2851; on loan to the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, since 2003) · Oil on panel · Image: "Public Domain" (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/); object metadata: CC0 1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) — Rijksmuseum Linked Art record.

The verses

Gen 11:1–9Now the whole world had one language and a common form of speech. And as people journeyed eastward, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” So they used brick instead of stone, and tar instead of mortar. “Come,” they said, “let us build for ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens, that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of all the earth.” Then the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the sons of men were building. And the LORD said, “If they have begun to do this as one people speaking the same language, then nothing they devise will be beyond them. Come, let Us go down and confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” So the LORD scattered them from there over the face of all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it is called Babel, for there the LORD confused the language of the whole world, and from that place the LORD scattered them over the face of all the earth.