Occupational Medicine 2010;60:247–248
doi:10.1093/occmed/kqq072
ART AND OCCUPATION
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Pieter Bruegel
Tower of Babel 1563
Radiant mid-summer light bathes a massive tower, which
reaches up to heaven through the clouds. In the left fore-
ground, a corpulent master builder (Antwerp’s nouveaux
riches) presents a group of cowering, exhausted stonema-
sons (the subjugated citizens of Antwerp) to a larger than
life king (the tyrant Nimrod alias Phillip II of Spain) and
his entourage. The masons have left their chisels and
a wooden mallet on a sandstone block, which is engraved
‘BRUEGEL FE MCCCCCLXIII’ (‘Made by Bruegel
1563’) [1]. The left side of the tower appears complete
but the right side is still under construction. The edifice,
which sits on an irregular mass of rock (Church of Rome),
has a circular structure like the Coliseum (alias St Peter’s)
and a honeycomb interior like a beehive. This construc-
tion site is teeming with human activity depicted in mar-
Ó Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
Ó The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society of Occupational Medicine.
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vellously accurate detail. Every kind of building work is
represented and we can follow the path of raw materials
from their arrival at the port to their final incorporation
into the structure of the building. Each trade (stone-
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masons, carpenters, plasterers, bricklayers, mortar
mixers, tinsmiths) has its own separate ‘on-site’ facility
and Bruegel, ever the humorist, shows the workers’ gar-
dens and their laundry hanging out to dry! Two labourers
in a man-powered crane are straining to turn a giant
tread-wheel so as to lift an enormous block of stone (Klein
has estimated that the two men could lift a 1-tonne slab
50 feet in 2.5 min) [2]. All the tradesmen seem highly
industrious and orderly like bees in a hive (versus) but
on closer inspection their work is uncoordinated and
never likely to succeed—a clear reference to Noah’s
248 OCCUPATIONAL MEDICINE
descendants, who after the flood built a great tower as
protection from a second flood and to glorify themselves
(God punished their hubris with a confusion of tongues
and the resulting chaos in communication rendered the
building work incapable of being finished) [3].
The Tower was Bruegel’s last major work before he
headed south to Brussels, safety and marriage. We do
not know whether it was commissioned but it appeared
in the inventory of the wealthy Antwerp merchant Niclaes
Jongelink in 1566 [4]. It is a highly inventive and deeply
thoughtful composition with a rhetorical narrative about
personal and public morality and a social commentary
on financial, religious and political issues of the day
[5]. Using a series of complex and elaborate images from
the well-known biblical story (versus) Bruegel creates
a subtle yet powerful indictment of the Church of Rome,
the occupying Spanish regime of Phillip II [6] and
Antwerp’s avaricious, aspiring business community [7].
He casts the tower’s shadow literally and metaphorically
over the city’s cathedral, bourse (stock exchange) and
port—a comment on their vulnerability. In the painting,
storm clouds are gathering—a portent of things to come
(4 years later Phillip II sent his troops into Antwerp) [8].
Bruegel was perhaps too close to the principal players
in Antwerp society or too frightened for his own safety
to address issues ‘head on’ and so he chose to express
his concerns indirectly through allegory and rhetoric.
These were turbulent times in Antwerp, which had expe-
rienced a massive inflow of religious refugees and foreign
merchants attracted respectively by the promise of toler-
ance and wealth. Bruegel had witnessed the city’s flam-
boyant development with its new town hall and Bourse
and the rise and fall of its great entrepreneurs like Gilbert
van Schoonbeke [9]. Now with his own imminent depar-
ture, Bruegel seems to be reflecting on his contempora-
ries’ failure to achieve their political and religious
freedom.
Bruegel was born in 1525 at Breda in the Duchy of
Brabant (now part of Holland) and moved to Antwerp
(c.1542) to become an apprentice to the artist and pub-
lisher Peter Coecke van Aelst (whose daughter he later
married). He was admitted to the Painters’ Guild of
St Lukes in 1551 and like many northern artists visited
Rome (1552–54). He appears to have brought little of
the Italian Renaissance back with him although his jour-
ney through the Alps may have inspired his landscape
style [10]. He spent the next 10 years working in Antwerp
before moving to Brussels in 1563 where he continued to
paint until his death in 1569. About 45 authenticated
paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder survive, of which
one-third are in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum [8].
Bruegel’s imaginary Renaissance building site al-
though realistic does not highlight the risks to that trade
but to the financial sector, which ultimately proved cata-
strophic for 16th-century Antwerp and little better for
21st-century London, New York, Reykjavik and the rest
of the capital obsessed world [11]. Jeff Skilling’s final
speech in Lucy Prebble’s recent play Enron might have
been written for Bruegel’s Netherlandish morality tale:
‘All humanity is here. There’s Greed, there’s Fear,
Joy, Faith, Hope . . . And the greatest of these . . . is
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Money’ [12].
Mike McKiernan
e-mail: art@som.org
References
1. Bruegel P. Tower of Babel 1563. Oil on Oak
Panel, 1143155cm. Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches
Museum.
2. Klein HA. Pieter Bruegel the elder as a guide to sixteenth
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