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ÉCOLE FLAMANDE DE LA SECONDE MOITIÉ DU XVIe SIÈCLE, ATELIER DE LUCAS VAN VALCKENBORCH L'ANCIEN
La tour de Babel
porte la marque de la ville d'Anvers (au revers du panneau)
huile sur panneau, circulaire
49 x 51,7 cm. (195⁄16 x 201⁄3 in.)
Provenance
Collection particulière de la région Grand Est, France.Post Lot Text
WORKSHOP OF LUCAS VAN VALCKENBORCH THE ELDER, THE TOWER OF BABEL, BEARS THE HANDS FROM ANTWERP MARK AT THE BACK OF THE PANEL, OIL ON PANEL, CIRCULAR
The Book of Genesis tells the story of the building of the Tower of Babel, a folly of human pride (Gen 11:1-9):
Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.
As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
They said to each other, "Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.
Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth."
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building.
The Lord said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.
Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."
So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.
That is why it was called Babel – because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
This story was an important iconographic source for several Flemish painters of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, whose depictions were inspired by the two works of the same name by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c. 1525-1569) in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (inv. no. GG_1026) and in the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam (inv. no. 2443 (OK).
We would like to thank Dr. Alexander Wied for suggesting an attribution to the workshop of Lucas van Valckenborch the Elder (c. 1535-1597) based on an examination of a photographic reproduction of the work.Special notice
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