Bible in art · Genesis

The Construction of the Tower of Babel (Ms. 33, fol. 13, from the Weltchronik)

Unknown painter, Regensburg · about 1400–1410
Getty Center, Los Angeles

Another page of the Regensburg Weltchronik, painted about 1400–1410. Painters of such chronicles often showed the building of Babel as a building site of their own day.

Workmen stand on wooden scaffolding at the top of a stone tower, laying blocks and drawing up loads on a pulley. Below, a man mixes mortar beside a tub, and a crowned king with a sceptre watches from the left.

From the text

“let us build for ourselves a city with a tower” (Genesis 11:4)
Bricks baked hard and tar for mortar (Genesis 11:3)

The artist’s own

A king overseeing the work — by tradition Nimrod, who is not named in this chapter
A crane, ropes and a hoist like those of a medieval building site

Details

The king

A crowned man in red holds a sceptre and looks on.

On the scaffold

Workmen lift and set blocks at the top of the tower.

The hoist

A load of stone is pulled up on a rope.

Mortar

A man stirs mortar with a long pole beside a wooden tub.

Unknown illuminator, Regensburg; text by Rudolf von Ems (Austrian, about 1200–1254). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (Ms. 33 (88.MP.70), fol. 13) · Tempera colors, gold, silver paint, and ink · Images provided here are believed to be in the public domain and are available under CC0 through Getty’s Open Content Program. (Getty record: "No Copyright", http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)

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.

See it at the museum’s site