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Tower of Babel (M. C. Escher)

Woodcut by M. C. Escher

Summary

Woodcut by M. C. Escher

Field	Value
image_file	Babel-escher.jpg
title	Tower of Babel
artist	M. C. Escher
year	1928
type	Woodcut
height_metric	62.1
width_metric	38.6
metric_unit	cm
imperial_unit	in

Tower of Babel is a woodcut print by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher, who created it in 1928, illustrating his early artistic interest in depicting new perspectives and unusual viewpoints in his works.

Description

The woodcut depicts the Tower of Babel, a biblical story about people attempting to build a tower to reach God, which is found in Genesis 11:9. Although Escher later dismissed his works before 1935 as of little or no value as they were "for the most part merely practice exercises," some of them, including the Tower of Babel, chart the development of his interest in perspective and unusual viewpoints that would become the hallmarks of his later, more famous, works, such as Belvedere and Waterfall.

In contrast to many other depictions of the biblical story, such as those by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (The Tower of Babel) and Gustave Doré (The Confusion of Tongues), Escher depicts the tower as a geometrical structure and places the viewpoint above the tower. This allows him to exercise his skill with perspective, but he also chose to centre the picture around the top of the tower as the focus for the climax of the action. He later commented:

Notes

References

Escher, Maurits. (2000). "M. C. Escher: The Graphic Work". [[Taschen]].
(2009). "Babylon". Oxford University Press.
[https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2024/ ''Title'']; Duke Law Library online; accessed December 2023

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

works-by-m.-c.-escher 1928-paintings woodcuts tower-of-babel-in-art

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