Bruegel, Tower of Babel발음듣기
Bruegel, Tower of Babel
[music] We're in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and we're looking at Bruegel's amazing painting, "The Tower of Babel."발음듣기
It's just, there's so much to look at, and it reminds you that before movies, before video, paintings could be incredibly entertaining.발음듣기
Man decided to build a building that would be so high, it would reach into the heavens; it would reach God.발음듣기
But God said now He would divide man by language, so that when these men could no longer communicate with each other, well, the building couldn't be built.발음듣기
But Bruegel is painting this now in the Renaissance, and there's a different set of meanings.발음듣기
When we think about the Renaissance, it's hard not to think about the massive building campaigns.발음듣기
Bruegel himself is living in Antwerp, an incredibly wealthy city that trades in luxury goods.발음듣기
All the things that we build, all the things that we create, all of the power and wealth that we have is really nothing before God.발음듣기
I think Bruegel makes that point rather nicely in the lower left corner of the painting, where you see a king, who is presumably the man who's ordering the building of this monument, and you see the workers who are actually carving stone, but also bowing down to him.발음듣기
There's a kind of irony there, because as the workers bow down to him, we know that this tower that they're building at his request is going to utterly fail; and in fact, it is failing right before our eyes, and before theirs, if only they would notice it too.발음듣기
In fact, the whole tower, although it seems so massive and so solid, is leaning to the left slightly, and it seems to be almost menacing the medieval city that's just beyond it.발음듣기
I mean, if we look at the center, there's uncut block; and then in other areas it looks completed; in other areas there's scaffolding.발음듣기
You see winches, and cranes - hoists - And sort of the basic construct itself seems to be loosely based on the Coliseum in Rome, which Brugel would have seen when he visited that city.발음듣기
And so, the whole thing really does seem as if it's possible, and there is this sense that here in the Renaissance, man has become so capable.발음듣기
If you read science fiction, it's always the robots and the computers that are the threat, right?발음듣기
You get a sense of trade, you have a sense of materials coming from afar in the ships on the extreme right; you see a large castle, but it's completely dwarfed by the massiveness of the tower itself.발음듣기
Everyone is building or carrying or carving or climbing or doing something to make this happen.발음듣기
And even while we know that futility is central, there's still an absolute love of the investigation of the building itself.발음듣기
We can see through it, and into the arches and spaces, and windows; and we want to know what it's like inside.발음듣기
Bruegel is giving us this wonderful, seductive environment, and then he's telling you, "You don't want to do this.발음듣기
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