FEIST in ART ZOOM 🔍 & the the Tower of BABEL | Google Arts & Culture

Hello, I'm Leslie Feist, and together we're going to look at one image, just one, very closely. This is the Tower of Babel, or Tower of Babel, depending on where you live. This is a very rare subject for painting, a Genesis image that comes after the flood, when mankind, drunk with pride, built a very high tower whose goal was to reach the sky. Seeing this, God rankled at the hubris of building a stairway to heaven, and scrambled their languages so all of humanity would be incomprehensible to one another. And this is how languages were born. Peter Bruegel the Elder was born in 1525. He was a Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painter, and a contemporary of Raphael and Michelangelo. So to put that in context, that's like the kings of convenience and Chance the Rapper. This painting is almost as tall as me, and stands five foot one. It seems to have been painted so viewers can almost dive into its details. All around here there's a feeling of bustling and busy work, a site where work and life are fading into one another, with the cranes and the scaffolding and the human-sized hamster wheel. Some temporary houses have been built like tiny mushrooms up on a giant redwood tree. The extraordinary sense of detail Bruegel possessed is highlighted by his gifted drawing and kind observational skills. I feel he was a humanist at heart. Zoom in and you'll see hundreds of tiny characters. A sailor in a crow's nest of a ship, workers curled up napping in the grass, women hanging transparent brushstrokes of linens while children gather under archways, the ghost of a fisherman, a man in the river. Oh never mind. The story goes that Bruegel would dress as a peasant and take gifts to weddings of strangers. As an uninvited guest he'd dive into the peasants partying, reveling, eating, dancing, and flirting, and developed his love and warmth for the people that he depicted later in his paintings. Both these miniature people and the very tiny Flemish-styled port city here provide a sense of scale for the gigantic tower of Babel. Like an onion slowly being peeled through time, we feel that we're seeing the conception and the construction, the completion and the crumbling of the tower all at once. See how the foundations are still under construction even though the structure already towers above the valley? It's a very human mistake to aspirationally aim for the sky but without solid footing. Contrary to the Bible, Bruegel seems to tell us that the reason the tower was doomed had more to do with structural failure than divine intervention. So was the tower of Babel designed by some inspired architect? Or was it the grandson of Noah? King Nimrod, over here you can see him with his scepter and robes and retinue of yay-sayers at the bottom left. Or like a golden tower in New York City? Some megalomaniac trying to compete with God? The fact that the tower looks like the Colosseum is a direct allusion to the destruction of the Roman Empire which grew excessively unwieldy and hence it was promised to ruin. While mankind was never able to truly build the tower of Babel, Bruegel the elder managed to paint three of them. The first is lost, the second smaller one you can see in Rotterdam, and the great tower of Babel here belongs to the Museum of Fine Arts in Vienna where you can go and dive into its details as well. That's art, it's great. The end.