The tower of Babel

Entry

The Old Testament relates how Noah’s descendants decided to build a tower that would reach right up to the heavens. To punish them for their pride God confused their language so that they could no longer understand each other and scattered them across the face of the earth, leaving the tower unfinished (Genesis 11:1-9). Its construction was said to have been supervised by Nimrod, the ruler of Babylon (Genesis 10:8-12), who is described as ‘a mighty hunter before the Lord’. In northern Renaissance art, which also shows the tower collapsing, its building symbolises human pride.¹ The subject of the construction of the tower, which is often round and spiral-shaped, is one of the most popular in western art.²

This little panel executed like a miniature is one of the earliest painted treatments of the subject, which had a longer tradition in illuminated manuscripts. The tower in this work is still of a relatively modest size. King Nimrod, who is inspecting the work, is portrayed as a giant, and the building site itself looks like a faithful rendering of late medieval practice. In that respect it is related to the depiction of the workmen around the tower in the ‘St Barbara’ of 1437 by Jan van Eyck in Antwerp.[Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten; illustrated in ENP I, 1967, pl. 26.] Several of the figures can also be seen in Eyckian miniatures, which prompted Winkler’s theory that the Rijksmuseum painting is based on a lost early work by Jan van Eyck.³ It is unclear whether it is derived from a work from Van Eyck’s shop or was composed later with the aid of Eyckian models. Grieten has pointed out that the artist used motifs from ‘Les anciennes croniques et consquestes de Charlemaine’, which was illuminated between 1458 and 1465 in the studio of Jan de Tavernier in Oudenaarde or Tournai; the manuscript belonged to Philip of Burgundy in 1467. Grieten assumes that the miniatures and the Rijksmuseum painting have a common ancestor, and suggests that the panel may have been painted by Jan de Tavernier or one of his assistants.⁴ Wescher identified the painter of the panel as the Flemish miniaturist Sanders Bening (c. 1450-1519), who illuminated the ‘Brevarium Grimani’ of c. 1515-20 with the aid of his son and Gerard Horenbaut. There are also correspondences between the depiction of the tower of Babel in that breviary and this panel.⁵

The detailed depiction and highly refined technique point to the hand of a miniaturist, but the style is far more archaic than that of Bening’s miniatures. Although there are no clues to place the artist in a specific city, it is likely that the panel was made by someone from the world of book illuminators in one of the centres in Flanders. The dendrochronology suggests a date in the final decades of the 15th century. The scene was very probably wider on the right, because the black framing line there lies on top of the original paint layer. It is conceivable that the composition was considerably wider and was originally oblong.
JPFK