The Tower of Babel

The Tower of Babel was a subject that permitted ambitious painters to combine large-scale architectural invention, crowd spectacle, and a moralizing biblical narrative in a single composition. The subject had been spectacularly explored by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in his two versions from the 1560s, and subsequent painters worked both within and against that Flemish tradition. Leandro Bassano's version in the National Gallery, London, dated around 1600, engages with the subject from the perspective of the Venetian workshop tradition, prioritising warm colouring, expansive landscape, and densely populated foreground activity. The tower itself functions as both architectural fantasy and theological emblem of human hubris, while the workers in the foreground bring the genre detail — tools, materials, labour — that was the Bassano family's particular speciality. The scene belongs to the last phase of Leandro's career when he was producing large narrative canvases that combined his father's narrative invention with his own more polished and elegant manner.

Large canvas with extensive use of ochre and warm brown grounds. The architectural tower is rendered with illusionistic precision in the middle distance, using perspective diminution to suggest enormous scale. Figure groups in the foreground show the looser, more gestural handling typical of Leandro's later work.