Pieter Bruegel the Elder
The painting we present today is on the cover of our 2024 DailyArt Desk Calendar, which is full of amazing masterpieces and stories about them. It was designed to enlighten your year. :)
In today's painting, Bruegel transfers the biblical Tower of Babel from ancient Mesopotamia to the 16th-century Netherlands. With the gigantic building reaching up to the heavens and dominating all around it, his radical composition has retained its power to fascinate and become an icon. Bruegel maximized the impression the tower makes by using two strongly contrasting scales. Violating the bounds of normal proportionality, the monumental-tiered construction comes across as a force of nature driving all the other compositional elements to the sideline and even threatening to burst through the frame’s limits. The dimensions of Bruegel’s Tower of Babel give it a certain monstrous quality, untamed and out of control, and it looks all the mightier for being contrasted with the tiny houses of the neighboring town based on Antwerp where Bruegel lived, in 1563, shortly before his move to Brussels.
Have a great Tuesday. :)
P.S. Have you already made your New Year's resolutions? Exploring art history might be a good idea. Subscribe to DailyArt Magazine newsletter and be sure to have the most interesting stories about art delivered to your mailbox!