On Bruegel's Multiplicity

“Antwerp was now the most cosmopolitan city in Europe. This plunge into the overwhelming world of sophisticated reality had a profound psychological effect on the young Bruegel. Moored up along the quayside he would have seen lateen-sail barques from Portugal, three-masters which had voyaged from ports as far afield as Zanzibar and Stavanger, their cargoes loaded onto barges from Delft or Mosel, barrels being rolled across the cobbles by sailors in ragged and exotic garb, marking them out as Finnish, Scottish, or Moorish. Lined up for sale would have been opened crates of currants from Cyprus, tulip bulbs from Constantinople, reeking salted hides from the eastern Baltic, barrels of sweet wine from Sicily... Yet all this went deeper than mere impressions and appearances. How could he absorb and express the sheer variety of teeming life he found milling around him amongst the vast cobbled space of the Grote Markt, overlooked by windowed cliffs of many-storied houses, with the great unfinished Gothic tower of the Cathedral of Our Lady reaching into the sky above the rooftops? How could he render such scenes without being overwhelmed by the sheer teeming multiplicity and variety of it all?”

Paul Strathern, “The Sheer Teeming Multiplicity and Variety of It All: The Life and Work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder,” https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/sheer-teeming-multiplicity-and-variety-it-all. Bruegel’s 1563 The Tower of Babel would be part of his answer.

The Tower of Babel, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563. Kunsthistorisches Museum.