One of the activities we’ve been trying in order to fill in some of the enforced idleness of isolation has been doing jigsaw puzzles. Normally we have one on the go at Christmas, but things are a little different this year! The picture we are tackling at the moment is a reproduction of Pieter Breughel’s Tower of Babel. It makes a nice change to have an image which is interesting in itself. Too often jigsaw puzzle designs are simply naff.
The complexity of the structure Breughel has imagined is mind-boggling, and so much of it consists of a near-repetition of other bits. If you don’t know the picture, it is an immense confusion of arches and windows.
It isn’t only interesting from the aspect of the puzzler, however, but also from an artistic point of view. Every square centimetre of the surface has some engaging detail. My wife was becoming quite animated this afternoon about the group in the left foreground, which appears to consist of the king who commissioned the structure and his court. I was more taken by the little folk with ladders who appear here and there, and by the glimpses Breughel gives us of how the interior is supposed to be constructed.
The picture is a wonderful illustration of a very important feature of the best painting. It compels the viewer to engage with it and do some work. It really is not possible just to take it in at a glance. What is more, it makes you think. If you don’t know the original Biblical legend, it concerns the attempt by humans to build a tower to reach Heaven.* To punish them for their effrontery God gave different languages to the peoples of the world, so they could no longer understand each other. This is a very strange interpretation, to my mind, of the importance of linguistic diversity. I think that language is wonderful, and I’m fascinated by its diversity and by the way in which different languages relate quite differently to thought processes, and impact variously on other aspects of culture. Far from bring a punishment, I regard linguistic diversity as a miracle and a wonder.
I think that this raises questions more generally about human diversity. Would we not all be poorer as a species if everybody was the same? There does seem to me to be something of a totalitarian mind lurking behind the Genesis story.
*It’s in the eleventh chapter of the book of Genesis.