The Tower of Babel (Brueghel) in the context of "Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting"

The Tower of Babel was the subject of two surviving paintings and one lost painting by Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The earliest of the three, a miniature painted on ivory, was completed in 1552–1553 while Bruegel was in Rome, and is now lost. The two surviving works are oil paintings on wood panels, sometimes distinguished by the prefix "Great" and "Little" and by their present location: Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien in Vienna and the latter in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. The Tower of Babel in Vienna is dated 1563, while the version in Rotterdam is undated but widely believed to have been painted sometime after.

The paintings depict the construction of the Tower of Babel, which, according to the Book of Genesis in the Bible, was built by a unified, monolingual humanity as a mark of their achievement and to prevent their dispersion: "Then they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.'" God punishes the builders for their vanity by "confusing their speech" into different languages so that they could no longer communicate; however, in both paintings, Bruegel focuses on the construction of the tower rather than the biblical story as a whole.