The Tower of Babel

In 1563 Pieter Bruegel the Elder dated his Tower of Babel, and the panel went to Niclaes Jonghelinck, an Antwerp merchant who kept it with his other Bruegels in a house outside the city walls. The subject stayed with Antwerp's painters for decades afterwards, and this copper is one of the later versions. The title fixes the moment. The tower is still going up, the work unfinished. What the museum will not supply is a year. Its entry says only 16th to 17th century, which in practice means somewhere inside a working life that ended in 1642. The tower has taken the picture travelling. In 2008 it went to the Louvre and then to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin for an exhibition about Babylon, and in 2012 and 2013 it toured Spain in a show that ran from Babel to Dubai.