“...and let us make us a name...”. Tobias Verhaecht’s Tower of Babel. The Masterpiece after Conservation

The completion of the conservation of the painting of The Tower of Babel made it possible to fully appreciate its exceptional artistic merits and to reconsider the attribution of the work for the first time in the more than 200 years it has spent in palaces and museums. The picture came to Russia from Germany after the Second World War as compensation for the destruction of cultural heritage.
Among the most significant works of the 17th-century Flemish school that depict the Tower of Babel, the painting in the State Hermitage collection occupies a special place.
The Tower of Babel was the product of a whole quartet of celebrated landscape artists active in the South Netherlands in the first quarter of the 17th century. The main parts of the composition – the landscape worked up in detail and the tower – were created by Tobias Verhaecht (1561–1631), who tackled this biblical subject several times. The landscape is executed in the artist’s typical manner, standing out for its refined colour scheme constructed on the contrast of blue-green and white shades in the depiction of crags and mountainous terrain. The personages in the right-hand part of the picture were painted by Hendrick de Clerck (c. 1570–1629/30): stonemasons, Gypsy women in brightly coloured costumes; here too the artist depicts the mythical ruler Nimrod wearing a cape and riding a horse. The group of figures on the left-hand side is the work of Jan Bruegel the Elder (1568–1625), one of the most important members of the Flemish school in the first quarter of the 17th century. The little figures that stand out against the dark background were carefully depicted with virtuoso skill. Meanwhile the numerous figures in the middle ground and further back were painted by Abel Grimmer (after 1570 – c. 1619/20).
The central part of the picture is taken up with the depiction of the Tower of Babel, which takes the form of a stepped pyramid. Buildings of that shape appear quite rarely in paintings. The tower is presented as a tremendous edifice with its upper part still unfinished, showing the viewer load-bearing brick walls not yet faced with stone. This element is important because the artist not only uses the device to show the non-completion of the builders’ concept, but also draws our attention to the wording of the biblical account of the tower being constructed specifically of bricks – a man-made material, created by people and not by nature. Broad ramps lead upwards from the base of the tower, with endless strings of carts carrying building materials making their way up them. This produces the impression of endless movement around the stages of the edifice.
In the right-hand part of the painting, amid the landscape, we can make out a row of kilns used to fire the bricks and also to make quicklime. On the left, next to the depiction of a port, the picture shows the processing of another material vital for the construction of a grand edifice – timber.
The whole foreground of the picture is filled with a depiction of stone dressers and stone layers engaged in their labours. All the stages in the process are shown from left to right, from the mining to the trimming of the stone and calculations of the dimensions needed for building. The craftsmen’s tools are meticulously illustrated in an allusion to humanity’s accumulated knowledge in the realm of architecture and construction. The way the personages are dressed points to their ethnic diversity. This range of origins was supposed to stress and heighten the idea of humanity’s unity in pursuit of the common goal described in the Bible – the building of a tower up to heaven and, ultimately, making a name for oneself.
Behind the masons in the foreground, there is a group of horsemen who are set apart from those around them by their rich attire, underlining their special status. One figure particularly stands out among them – a tall man with expensive headwear and a long cape that falls over the horse’s rump. In this personage we can divine the mythical King Nimrod, whom Flemish painters traditionally depicted as the man who commissioned the Tower of Babel. The negative attitude towards this figure is indicated by a couple of little scenes taking place around him: one shows some bound captive slaves watched over by guards, another people being beaten by a guard. The idea of imminent punishment for humanity’s sinful intentions is also borne out by the depiction of an execution scene in the left part of the picture.
On the lower left, an attentive observer will spot in front of the river, by a rock, the little figure of a grey heron. The wading bird looks especially vulnerable juxtaposed to the tremendous structure of the tower and prompts thoughts of the fragility and impermanence of life.
Tobias Verhaecht’s painting is as profound and rich in meanings as the biblical tale of building a tower to heaven itself. It is possible to find in it both allusions to various philosophical interpretations of the Old Testament myth and respect for the exact sciences, geometry and mathematics, which expresses itself in the detailed depiction of the rules of architecture and building equipment that were used in the artists’ time.
Based on materials from the exhibition catalogue with texts by Anna Aponasenko, Mariam Dandamayeva, Maxim Lapshin and Alisa Mezentseva.

The first section is devoted to objects from ancient Babylonia. The biblical account of a gigantic building project conceived by people states: “And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.” (Gen. 11:3–7. KJV) The Old Testament myth of the Tower of Babel would seem to have arisen during the period of the Jewish people’s Babylonian captivity, when Nebuchadnezzar II, the ruler of the mighty Babylonian Empire, ravaged Jerusalem and took a considerable portion of the city’s population away as prisoners. That is why the first part of the display is given over to things that came from ancient Babylon. One of the most important structures within the metropolis was the Esagila temple complex dedicated to the city’s chief god, Marduk. Rising to the north of Esagila was the ziggurat Etemenanki that would become the inspiration for the biblical Tower of Babel. Ziggurats were structures in the form of a stepped pyramid surmounted by a small temple that was also dedicated to the city’s chief deity. In the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar’s time, all buildings were constructed from kiln-fired bricks of a standard shape and size. One of those bricks bearing the impressed stamp of the name and titles of the ruler – “Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, custodian of the temples of Esagila and Ezida, first-born son of Nabopolassar, King of Babylon” – can be seen in the exhibition.
The second section of the display is devoted to the depiction of the building of the Tower of Babel in Western European and Russian art of the 16th–19th centuries. The subject of this construction had already made its appearance in mediaeval European art, but only in occasional, isolated works. In the 1500s and 1600s the situation changed, and against a background of the rapid growth of commercial cities and of economic and cultural ties across the continent, accompanied by communication and diplomacy, the theme of the building of the tower and the confusion of languages became exceptionally popular. A great many paintings and graphic works were produced on the subject, and a particular tradition emerged for the depiction of the tower and personages from the legend.
The display includes an illustrated copy of Antiquities of the Jews, a work by the Roman–Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (37–100 AD), that is important for our understanding today of the meaning that 16th- and 17th-century European artists invested in the biblical personages that they depicted. In his retelling of the Tower of Babel legend, Flavius Josephus was the first to state that its construction was commissioned by King Nimrod. That figure is mentioned in the Bible, but not in direct connection with the tower episode. With the appearance of Josephus’s work, the image of a despotic ruler forcing people to disregard the will of God started to be discussed in theological treatises and to be depicted in the paintings and graphic works of 16th- and 17th-century European artists. One such example is provided by the Bible produced by the Dutch publisher and engraver Nicolaas Johannes Piscator (the Latinized version of the name Claes Janszoon Visscher, 1587–1652). A showcase presents one of the prints from Piscator’s Bible – The Confusion of Languages at the Building of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:7–8). It shows the moment when people ceased to understand one another in the form of some divine breath, a wind that causes motion. Nimrod appears here too, depicted as a mighty ruler staggered by the vengeance of heaven.
In the late 17th century, scholars began to examine the construction of the Tower of Babel in their works. Drawing upon their knowledge of the precise sciences (mathematics, physics, geometry) they sought to prove the impossibility or, on the contrary, the hypothetical possibility of humanity constructing a tower “unto heaven”. In doing so, they did not call into question the building of a tower in ancient times. The display features the best-known work of this kind – the study Turris Babel by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. Its author calculated the size and weight of the biblical edifice, as well as the number of bricks required to build the tower.
The image of the Tower of Babel was not only contemplated by men of learning, but also used for the amusement of the general public. The mysterious tower was reproduced as one of the most popular subjects in the pictures specially created for viewing through an optical device called a zograscope, consisting of a mirror and lens. The exhibition includes a print by an unknown artist of The City of Babylon and the Tower of Babel(Augsburg, 1760s) intended to be presented in this way. Optical distortions gave the view the illusion of depth and three dimensions. In the second half of the 18th century, zograscopes were a fashionable parlour entertainment, while also appearing at fairs for the common folk.
The third section. The 20th century might be described as a time of particular philosophical reflection on the Tower of Babel myth, something encouraged both by humanity’s rapid scientific and technical advances and by certain political events – the redistribution of colonial empires and two world wars. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, that reflection resulted in the biblical legend of a tower built unto heaven increasingly being presented as an account of the first technological disaster in human history, forcing us to think about the potential final outcome of technological advances. Furthermore, the early 20th century brought archaeological discoveries that made it possible to picture ancient Babylon and its edifices, including the ziggurat Etemenanki.
Particularly noteworthy among the 20th-century items in the display is an illustration by Kees van Dongen (1877–1968) for Voltaire’s short story The Princess of Babylon, which presents a sort of collective image of the tower based on the architectural form of the ziggurat that had already been uncovered and reconstructed by archaeologists. Also of interest is an Iraqi commemorative coin from the time of Saddam Hussein’s rule bearing a depiction of the Babylonian ziggurat that he planned to recreate. The “youngest” exhibit is a statuette of The Babylonian Snailcreated by Anton Ananyev in 2010. This miniature work presents a new interpretation of the image of the tower familiar from many pictures by European artists and testifies once more to the enduring interest in the biblical legend of the Tower of Babel.