 | HOME |
 | Click here to enlarge Hendrick III van Cleve's La Construction de la Tour de Babel |
| Click here to enlarge Hendrick III van Cleve's second La Construction de la Tour de Babel |
 | Click here for more about Nataša Durovicová's essay Los Toquis, or Urban Babel |
"...through the Middle Ages exclusively, [the] perennial threat of dispersed, failed communication must be overcome by a religious adherence to a perfect language, to a non-vernacular lingua franca, i.e. to the artificial meta-language of Latin, which is the exclusive tool - indeed home - of the Global Church itself. But with the Reformation after mid-16th century legitimizing the spoken vernaculars in their full arbitrariness and variety, over and against the unifying force of Latin, it was the iconic medium of painting that became a necessary or at least a particularly suitable strategy and representational supplement for rendering the scene of polylinguality in the reformed North-European countries. Heteroglossia’s disunifying force was now contained formally, by a frame. Or inversely, painting seized the translator's privilege of ubiquity and mobility. Hence the sudden proliferation of the Babel motif in the North-European painting." - Nataša Durovicová, Los Toquis, or Urban Babel
The four paintings above are ascribed to Hendrick van Cleve (1525-1589), and belong to the same European tradition of paintings as those by Hans Holbein the Younger, Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Abel Grimmer. Van Cleve was one of several painters and teams of painters who depicted the Tower of Babel in the 16th century, forming a loose movement or school.
This painting was by Hendrick van Cleve and Louis de Caullery (1555-1622).
Marten van Valkenborch (1535-1612). Valkenborch (or Valckenborch, or Valkenborgh) was one of a family of Netherlandish landscape and genre painters, the most important members of which were Marten and his older brother Lucas (1535-1597). Both worked in the Bruegel tradition, and both favored the subject of the Tower of Babel.
Peter Balten (1525-1598) - notice the similarity to the Valkenborch painting above!
Even into the seventeenth century, the Tower of Babel remained a popular topic for artists. This painting was by the École Italienne.