World famous painting: "Tower of Babel" or "Tower of Babel"

Title: Tower of Babel or Tower of Babel

Pieter Brueghel the Elder (painted at age 38)

Print size: 100x72.5cm (other sizes can be customized)

Material: Oil on canvas imported from the UK (with inner frame)

Image craftsmanship: museum collection-level art micro-spraying, German Cruise, Japanese Epson art scanning, micro-spraying;

Production unit: 2018 China's top 10 printing industry innovations, has won the Chinese, China Institute of Printing and Printing, Keyin Media jointly organized the "Digital Printing in China" Grand Prix 3 gold awards, 4 silver awards, 6 bronze awards.

Original size: 155x114cm

Original Material: Oak panel

Created in: 1563

The current collection place: The Kunsthistorismuseum in Vienna is the treasure of the town hall

Peter Brueghel in brief introduction to Pieter Brueghel the Elder

Peter Bruegel was the greatest painter of the Netherlands in the 16th century. Throughout his life, he used rural life as the subject of artistic creation, and people called him "the Bruegel of the peasants". He was thoughtful, humorous by nature, and fond of exaggerated art styles, so people gave him the nickname "Funny Bruegel". His representative works include "Christ with the Cross", "The Snow Hunter", "Babel Tower" and so on.

Peter Bruegel (c. 1525–1569) was a famous peasant painter in the Netherlands. Born in bruegel, North Brabant, The Netherlands. His first teacher was Van Ulster, who grew up in stained glass religious paintings, and later learned from Cork, a publisher and painter in Antwerp who valued folk printmaking, who had a profound influence on him. In 1551, Bruegel completed his studies and became a member of the Antwerp Painters' Guild. From 1552 onwards, he traveled to Italy and France in order to gain a wide range of knowledge. The following winter, he returned to work at Cock's painting shop. In 1563, Bruegel married Marie, the daughter of his first teacher, and moved to Brussels, where he remained there until his death at the age of about 44. More than five years in Brussels was the most exuberant period of his work and the golden age of his art.

Contents of the work

The story of Babel (The Tower of Babylon and the Tower of Babel) is found in The Old Testament chapter 11 of Genesis: Legend has it that after the Flood, Noah moved east to Shena and found a great plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where he was engaged in production and procreation. The land was fertile and the days were getting more and more prosperous, and it later became a populous town. Because the ancestors were afraid of the flood and worried about the flood again, they decided to build a tower that reached the sky to prevent the trouble. They learned the technique of building tall buildings from materials such as stone, burnt brick and lime, and soon built towers higher and higher. The plan for this tower is huge, and to accommodate the whole city, the height must reach the zenith.

When God Jehovah learned of this, he decided to go to the earth to see for himself, and when he saw the tower behind him, he was shocked and angry, and thought to himself, The human beings who have just prospered have such a superb ability, how will the tower lead directly to my throne in the future. He decided to cast a spell to disrupt the language of the Sheddah. In this way, if the people who were building the tower did not understand each other, the project could not be carried out any longer, and many disputes occurred, and the result was that the tower was not built, causing chaos. In the end, people had to disperse in groups according to the interleaved language. People drop their tools and materials and admit that it is a punishment for blasphemy against God. This half-built tower is called the Tower of Babel (meaning chaos in ancient Hebrew). This is the story of Christianity's interpretation of the origin of the world's various national languages, while the painter focused on the chaos caused by the construction of the tower.

Creative background

In 1563, Bruegel moved to Brussels, and in the same year he created the Tower of Babel, a masterpiece with a profound biblical theme. As we mentioned earlier, this subject matter belongs to his second category of works. Such works often use appropriate biblical stories to allude to real-world strife.

Appreciation of works

In 1563, Bruegel moved to Brussels, and in the same year he created the Tower of Babel, a masterpiece with a profound biblical theme. Such works often use appropriate biblical stories to allude to real-world strife.

The painter depicts the Tower of Babel (also known as the "Tower of Babel") with a grand composition, shows the height of the Tower with clouds and mist, and depicts the relationship between people and things, people and the environment with genre painting techniques. With the skill of miniature painting, the painter depicts many episodic character activities to reveal the power of man over nature. In this biblical allegorical painting, the painter expresses the irreconcilability of "Providence" and man in transforming the world, and the struggle between man and nature is heroic and tragic at the same time.

In order to represent the tower of Babel at a soaring height, Bruegel handles this fantastical scene with a grand composition. Not only did he elaborately depict numerous figures, but he also cut off a top with clouds at the top of the tower, and painted a faintly visible top of the tower on the clouds to show the terrible height to which the tower had been built. The tower is located by the sea, and there are also docked boats on the beach in the right corner. In the distance is a dense collection of houses, which show a magnificent plain scenery. The director of the tower led a group of guards to inspect the truth of the suspension: the quarrelsome craftsmen had dispersed, and only a few remained to wait for the director's arrival, and one of them knelt down to the director, explaining the complexity of the accident, but it seemed that his words also made it impossible for the director and the guards to understand. Directly in front of the tower, there is a "collapse", and the situation is obviously unmanageable.

With the skill of miniature painting, the painter painted dense and small images of construction workers and vehicles on each floor of the tower. The interior of each floor of the tower is a whole, and it is very tightly packed with each other. In order to pursue this huge and chaotic painting effect, Bruegel deliberately opened the proportional distance between the figure and the tower, nature, etc., thus showing the greatness and arduousness of "engineering", and also showing the creative power of human beings. In revealing man's triumph over the pressures of nature, the painter emphasizes rhapsodical color. The aesthetic value of this biblical allegorical painting lies in the fact that it subtly highlights the irreconcilability of "Providence" and man in transforming the world, which is essentially the price of the old bottle of new wine, celebrating the new life of mankind, but it faces a price full of tragedy. This is another manifestation of the painter's humanistic ideas. The painting is 114 × 155 cm in size and is now in the Kunsthistorischesmuseum in Vienna.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, located in the central section of Vienna's Ringstraße, opposite the famous Hofburg Imperial Palace, constitutes a unique sight. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna is one of the fourth largest art museums in the world, and its interior houses countless treasures from human history, condensing the essence of European art history.

The museum consists of five parts, Egyptian and Oriental, classical art, painting, sculpture and decorative arts, and the works of famous painters such as Rubens, Rembrandt, Dürer, Raphael, Titian and others, which are also treasured in this art museum.

It is worth mentioning that in this great museum of art history, there is a painting that is very famous, which is "Tower of Babel". The Tower of Babel, also known as the Tower of Babylon, is a tall tower built under the auspices of the new King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon, and in hebrew languages, "Babel" means "chaos", and the Tower of Babel is also a reference to the expansion of human desires to the limit. The author of the oil painting "Tower of Babel" is the famous painter Bruegel, who created this oil painting at the age of 38, reflecting the dispute between the real world and the ideal world.

What exactly is the content of Tower of Babel? This also begins with European mythology. In the chapter of Genesis, a terrible flood is described, after which people were freed from the horror of the aftermath of the disaster, but they were still afraid of heaven. In order to completely eliminate mankind's fear of flooding, the new king Nebuchadnezzar II decided to build a tower for his people to bring everyone together and no longer be affected by the flood.

This is the background to the construction of the Tower of Babel, and it is this interesting story that is vividly depicted by Borugel. In "Tower of Babel", a huge cake-shaped tower is very conspicuous, and above its top, there are actually floating clouds, highlighting the tallness and majesty of the Tower of Babel, and even showing a sense of vision that breaks through the sky. The tower part of the Tower of Babel, located right on the seashore, in the right corner of the beach, also docks many boats, and in the distance is densely packed with houses and grasslands, which also hints at the fact that this area is a human settlement.

However, it is worth noting that above the front of the tower, there is obviously a landslide, and a group of people in the lower left corner of the picture should be the tower construction director and the person in charge of the project, but it is obvious that from their expressions, the two sides seem to be completely unable to communicate, which should be caused by the language barrier.

"Tower of Babel" is a huge and varied work of art, but in essence, it is a masterpiece of clever puppetry. In this famous painting, Bruegel not only gives us a visual impact, but also interprets three "original sins" in it.

Original sin one, the sin of idolatry. It is no exaggeration to say that architecture is a scientific skill, and when architecture develops to a certain extent, people will worship it and become obsessed with it, which is precisely an original sin. The progress of human society depends on science and technology, and while worshipping science and technology, human beings are also moving towards prosperity. But, from another point of view, if the cult of an event is so infatuated that it is hopelessly incurable, it can also have disastrous consequences. For example, after the unification of the Six Kingdoms by the State of Qin, Qin Shi Huang was madly obsessed with force and sent tens of thousands of laborers to build the Afang Palace, and finally could only end up with a "Chu people torched, poor scorched earth" end.

Original sin two, the sin of pride.

Humans live on Earth with other creatures, but we are at the top of the food chain and are the real masters. It is precisely because of the rapid rise of status that human beings have gradually begun to be proud, and pride is often the prelude to failure, which is imperceptible. The king's construction of the Tower of Babel was undoubtedly an act of challenge to heaven, which exceeded the red line between God and man, and overstepping was an act of challenge that God could not tolerate, and thus mankind was punished by being changed language.

Original Sin III: The Sin of Trespassing.

In ancient class societies, man needed to be divided into three, six, nine, and so on, and God was above man and had an unshakable dominance. The construction of the Tower of Babel was tantamount to a challenge to the authority of the gods, and this challenge was foolish. The idea that human beings, who are supposed to live on the land, always dream of living in heaven, is both divorced from the essence of the problem and breaks the inherent rules, and the sin of trespassing may be the most terrible of the three original sins.

Speaking of this, we would also like to add that in fact, there is a legend about the Tower of Babel to be completed. The large-scale collapse in "Tower of Babel" is actually just a loophole in the construction of the project, not a punishment from heaven, and the heavens just cleverly lowered the curse, causing people who originally spoke one language to have language barriers, differentiating into various languages, and then making it unable to fully communicate and preventing the continued construction of the Tower of Babel.

In short, no matter what, "Tower of Babel" is a painting full of allegory, which has left the wisdom and life perception of the predecessors for future generations, and also provided warnings and exhortations for future generations.

The use of digital prints to present the original work was initially the practice of some museums for the purpose of protecting works of art. For example, the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, the British Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Hermitage Museum in Russia are all using digital prints to replace the master's original works for daily exhibition to prevent the original works from being damaged or stolen in the exhibition. Using professional color management equipment and color management technology, the traditional way can not achieve such saturated colors and sharp edges, the bottom plate also has a new and bright beauty, accurate and perfect presentation of the essence of the original painting.