巴别塔

This is the smaller of the two towers of Babel that Bruegel left behind, the one now in Rotterdam, and he seems to have painted it late, around 1568, only a year or so before he died. It repeats the composition of the larger version in Vienna at half the width and half the height, a vast brick spiral climbing into cloud while tiny workers swarm its ramps and the thing already leans and cracks as it rises. Bruegel knew his Antwerp, a boom town of cranes and scaffolding, and the tower carries that same restless building energy. The picture later belonged to Rudolf II, the Habsburg emperor in Prague who collected the strange and the marvellous. X-rays show that the Rotterdam tower once matched its Vienna twin even more closely than it does today.