WEBVTT 00:00:00.457 --> 00:00:02.040 LESLIE FEIST: Hello, I'm Leslie Feist. 00:00:02.040 --> 00:00:05.760 And together, we're going to look at one image. 00:00:05.760 --> 00:00:06.960 Just one. 00:00:06.960 --> 00:00:11.070 Very closely. 00:00:11.070 --> 00:00:14.300 This is the Tower of Babel, or Tower of Babel, 00:00:14.300 --> 00:00:17.190 depending on where you live. 00:00:17.190 --> 00:00:19.910 This is a very rare subject for painting-- 00:00:19.910 --> 00:00:23.750 a Genesis image that comes after the flood, when mankind drunk 00:00:23.750 --> 00:00:27.710 with pride built a very high tower, whose goal 00:00:27.710 --> 00:00:30.440 was to reach the sky. 00:00:30.440 --> 00:00:33.050 Seeing this, God rankled at the hubris 00:00:33.050 --> 00:00:35.510 of building a stairway to heaven, 00:00:35.510 --> 00:00:37.940 and scrambled their languages so all of humanity 00:00:37.940 --> 00:00:40.590 would be incomprehensible to one another. 00:00:40.590 --> 00:00:43.590 And this is how languages were born. 00:00:43.590 --> 00:00:47.840 Pieter Bruegel the Elder was born in 1525. 00:00:47.840 --> 00:00:49.550 He was a Dutch and Flemish Renaissance 00:00:49.550 --> 00:00:54.265 painter, and a contemporary of Rafael and Michelangelo. 00:00:54.265 --> 00:00:55.640 So to put that in context, that's 00:00:55.640 --> 00:00:59.290 like the Kings of Convenience and Chance the Rapper. 00:00:59.290 --> 00:01:04.360 This painting is almost as tall as me, and stands 5'1". 00:01:04.360 --> 00:01:07.300 It seems to have been painted so viewers can almost 00:01:07.300 --> 00:01:10.300 dive into its details. 00:01:10.300 --> 00:01:11.830 All around here, there's a feeling 00:01:11.830 --> 00:01:15.700 of bustling and busy work, a site where work and life are 00:01:15.700 --> 00:01:17.710 fading into one another. 00:01:17.710 --> 00:01:19.750 With the cranes, and the scaffolding, 00:01:19.750 --> 00:01:23.350 and the human sized hamster wheel. 00:01:23.350 --> 00:01:26.500 Some temporary houses have been built like tiny mushrooms 00:01:26.500 --> 00:01:29.260 up on a giant Redwood tree. 00:01:29.260 --> 00:01:31.720 The extraordinary sense of detail Bruegel possessed 00:01:31.720 --> 00:01:35.260 is highlighted by his gifted drawing and kind observational 00:01:35.260 --> 00:01:36.550 skills. 00:01:36.550 --> 00:01:38.980 I feel he was a humanist at heart. 00:01:38.980 --> 00:01:43.120 Zoom in and you'll see hundreds of tiny characters. 00:01:43.120 --> 00:01:46.210 A sailor in a crow's nest of a ship. 00:01:46.210 --> 00:01:49.990 Workers curled up napping in the grass. 00:01:49.990 --> 00:01:52.810 Women hanging transparent brushstrokes of linens 00:01:52.810 --> 00:01:55.930 while children gather under archways. 00:01:55.930 --> 00:01:58.660 The ghost of a fisherman. 00:01:58.660 --> 00:02:02.860 A man in the river-- oh, never mind. 00:02:02.860 --> 00:02:05.050 The story goes that Bruegel would dress as a peasant 00:02:05.050 --> 00:02:08.139 and take gifts to weddings of strangers. 00:02:08.139 --> 00:02:11.800 As an uninvited guest, he'd dive into the peasants' partying-- 00:02:11.800 --> 00:02:16.040 reveling, eating, dancing, and flirting, and develop his love 00:02:16.040 --> 00:02:18.040 and warmth for the people that he depicted later 00:02:18.040 --> 00:02:19.600 in his paintings. 00:02:19.600 --> 00:02:22.810 Both these miniature people and the very tiny Flemish styled 00:02:22.810 --> 00:02:26.890 port city here provide a sense of scale for the gigantic Tower 00:02:26.890 --> 00:02:29.140 of Babel. 00:02:29.140 --> 00:02:32.530 Like an onion slowly being peeled through time, 00:02:32.530 --> 00:02:34.960 we feel that we're seeing the conception 00:02:34.960 --> 00:02:38.170 and the construction, the completion and the crumbling 00:02:38.170 --> 00:02:41.110 of the tower all at once. 00:02:41.110 --> 00:02:44.115 See how the foundations are still under construction, 00:02:44.115 --> 00:02:45.490 even though the structure already 00:02:45.490 --> 00:02:48.200 towers above the valley? 00:02:48.200 --> 00:02:52.300 It's a very human mistake to aspirationally aim for the sky, 00:02:52.300 --> 00:02:54.490 but without solid footing. 00:02:54.490 --> 00:02:56.612 Contrary to the Bible, Bruegel seems 00:02:56.612 --> 00:02:58.570 to tell us that the reason the tower was doomed 00:02:58.570 --> 00:03:00.310 had more to do with structural failure 00:03:00.310 --> 00:03:02.710 than divine intervention. 00:03:02.710 --> 00:03:05.410 So was the Tower of Babel designed 00:03:05.410 --> 00:03:07.450 by some inspired architect? 00:03:07.450 --> 00:03:09.700 Or was it the grandson of Noah? 00:03:09.700 --> 00:03:11.530 King Nimrod over here-- you can see him 00:03:11.530 --> 00:03:14.500 with his scepter, and robes, and retinue of yea-sayers 00:03:14.500 --> 00:03:15.910 at the bottom left. 00:03:15.910 --> 00:03:19.480 Or like a golden tower in New York City, some megalomaniac 00:03:19.480 --> 00:03:22.240 trying to compete with God? 00:03:22.240 --> 00:03:24.820 The fact that the tower looks like the Colosseum 00:03:24.820 --> 00:03:27.010 is a direct allusion to the destruction of the Roman 00:03:27.010 --> 00:03:29.710 Empire, which grew excessively unwieldy, 00:03:29.710 --> 00:03:32.470 and hence, it was promised to ruin. 00:03:32.470 --> 00:03:35.920 While mankind was never able to truly build the Tower of Babel, 00:03:35.920 --> 00:03:38.930 Bruegel the Elder managed to paint three of them. 00:03:38.930 --> 00:03:40.900 The first is lost. 00:03:40.900 --> 00:03:43.840 The second smaller one you can see in Rotterdam. 00:03:43.840 --> 00:03:45.340 And the great Tower of Babel here 00:03:45.340 --> 00:03:48.100 belongs to the Museum of Fine Arts in Vienna, 00:03:48.100 --> 00:03:52.300 where you can go and dive into its details as well. 00:03:52.300 --> 00:03:53.170 That's art. 00:03:53.170 --> 00:03:54.640 It's great. 00:03:54.640 --> 00:03:56.459 The end.