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The Tower

The temple tower of the city's deity Marduk which stood in ancient Babylon had the shape of a stepped ziggurat on a rectangular ground plan.

In the history of European art, however, the tower appears always in the architectural style contemporary with the illustration: in medieval manuscripts − which, in their central portrayal of the tower's construction, feature every detail of the crafts and trades involved − it appears as a military bastion, relieved by buildings based on gothic church towers. With the rediscovery and reappraisal of the ancient architectural designs of the Coliseum in the Renaissance, launched in particular by Fillipo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) and Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), the tower of Babylon also takes on its circular shape. This idea of the building, on the model provided by Pieter Breugel the Elder (1525/31-1569), influenced all following centuries: countless images of towers were produced, kindred heirs to the great Flemish master.

Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923) built his iron tower for the World Exhibition of 1889 as a gigantic monument to the nineteenth-century belief in progress, though at the time its construction drew protests from the artists. Their famous manifesto described it as "useless and monstrous", "a new Tower of Babel." Even today the Tower of Babel is a synonym for a colossal type of architecture, whose ambition knows no human bounds. Thus New York, in the skyscraper-obsessed building spree of the 1920s, was given its epithet of New Babylon, something reflected in the architecture of power featured impressively Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). This negative significance of the tower as cathedral of evil, an expression of the pride and delusions of grandeur of its legendary builder Nimrod, loves on in popular culture, in Sauron's tower of Barad-dûr in the film version of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (2001-2003), for instance.

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