The Tower of Babel

By the time Joos de Momper painted this tower around 1595, the subject was already a Flemish favourite. Pieter Bruegel the Elder had painted his famous version some 30 years earlier, and Antwerp workshops kept returning to it. The story comes from Genesis: people build a tower to reach heaven, and their single language is scattered into many so they can no longer understand one another. Momper was a landscape man above all, and he uses the tower as an excuse for a vast, hazy view, a spiralling structure the size of a mountain, tiny cranes and scaffolds crawling up its sides, a whole plain opening behind it toward a distant sea. He would paint the subject more than once. The unfinished top, half lost in cloud, is the part he lingers on.