The Tower of Babel....
My Options, Dear Readers, for a model to use for my painting of The Tower of Babel, were numerous and varied. It was another of the very standardized and popular images in Medieval iconography used to show the folly of human ambition and pride, and the consequences of disobeying the guidance from above. The Medieval versions all include renderings of the actual methods of construction in use at the time of the portrayal, and thus are a wealth of information to scholars looking for the history of developing technologies. Above, you can see the hoists used to get materials to the top of the construction, as well as workers carving the stone windows.
And here is another very similar version,
just to show you how similar some of the portrayals were.
These were both from the fourteenth century,
probably German sources.
(This particular reference I have, "Medieval Crafts A Book of Days"
was printed in 1993 and is not detailed about the origin of the artworks.)
Here is another, fairly early one tucked into the Illuminated Initial
(I have shown you this one before as reference to
the Creation and Adam and Eve paintings)...
as you can see the shape is less vertical and the style is more primitive,
but the workers are carving the stone and lugging it up the Tower.
Here is the version in The Illuminated Naples Bible
that I have shown you before.... once again,
it is fairly early in style and the tower is not vertical
but the workers are hard at work!
Here is another version that is fairly early in style
but has a wealth of "technology" to use in aid of construction!
Again, the references on this illumination are not available.
This is the earliest reference I've seen of a
human treadmill to hoist the materials.
This is a much more sophisticated,
later version from the mid fifteenth century.
It is later than I would use, but it shows
the persistence of the basic iconography.
This is from the Bedford Hours.
And then there is this one, which combines
many of the pieces I wanted to include....
the workers and the technology as well as the
"timeless" feeling of the Tower itself...
not very tall yet... but going up!
It is from the early to mid fourteenth century
in style of artwork, again I have no details
for the manuscript it originates in.
I also needed to restrict it and alter the
arrangement to fit my smaller panel...
but I know how to do that!
There was no question of being able to just trace this image...
I was going to have to draw my own version
from scratch to fit it all into the panel.
Initially that felt daunting.... but I just got going
and in the end came up with a pretty good facsimile.
I traced the panel's shape onto ordinary paper
so I would be working in the right dimensions.
Then I just drew the image as plainly as I could
(none of the frills... just the outlines)...
because I was going to need to transfer this
to the panel using the graphite pencil method.
Which results in this.... yeah...
it is pretty difficult to make out the specifics!
Now it was time to ink the outlines using my .005 micron pen.
This was slow careful work in bright light.
Because I had drawn the original version,
I could identify the pencil marks....
And I ended up with the outline drawing all laid out...
but had to wait twenty-four hours for the ink to dry properly
(the humid air is relentless... 70% as I write and this is a "dryish" day)
before I could begin the actual painting.
Starting with the flesh tones and then the red...
the most obvious, most defining small bits of color...
it immediately brings the painting alive!
Then the blue and most of the gray...
trying to get its rough shades in the right places.....
here I am copying what the Medieval original has...
not what I would know to be more "correct" perspective.
I have to work at not modernizing the picture!
And adding the green ground,
and the few green clothes.....
And the ocher wood hues.
These are all just the base coats.....
fairly roughly applied.
And then the background color!
I argued with myself for a while about the background color...
(isn't this a familiar tale by now...?)
The original appears to be a dark salmon orange.
But this is a bit deceptive.
The original has a subtle overall pattern
covering the background color.
This is a very common fourteenth century painting style.
The "ground" is redder than it appears,
but is overlaid with a yellow grid of diamonds and quatrefoils,
with a grayish cross shape in the middle of each diamond shape.
Complicated!
Not what would work on a large scale mural painting...
although I am still toying with adding a pattern....
But the resulting appearance of that background
is a salmon-ish orange.
The only thing I was sure of is that my background
was now too dark. So I repainted it a paler salmon color.
Here you can see the lighter background,
and the beginnings of stonework details and shading.....
At this point I forgot to take pictures and just did the thing
of adding detail to whatever caught my attention.....
believe me... there is a ton of detail in this small painting.....!
Starting to define the tread-wheel apparatus....
And the lumber of the construction platform....
but I confess, I was having a hard time
making myself work on all those little people.....
Fourteen little people plus the Lord above...!
But it had occurred to me that the guy way up on the top....
reaching for the crane rope... reminded me a bit
of my older brother who has worked much of his life in the building trades...
and has been known to do some complex "rigging" from time to time...
and suddenly I couldn't think of him as anyone
but my brother Patrick...!
So, Okay, I painted him to look a little bit like my brother!
Which meant I was going to have to paint one of
the others to look like my younger brother
who has also spent much of his life in the building trades....
(far away from his older brother, of course...)
and maybe because I was needing some help
to get inspired I suddenly noticed I had a visitor.....
"Hey..!" said Wanda.... waving in my direction...
"I'm 'Wanda'..." and I just wanta see what you're doing... "
she added as she jumped into my painting....
"I think these guys look like my brothers...." she added,
laughing, as she jumped down to the scaffolding.
I looked up again, having just painted my younger brother Jonathan
as the mason carving the rock at the bottom right....
(Jonathan has always had a thing for rocks......)
"You better watch out for the wet paint..." I said, chidingly....
not sure where she was going with this....
"Oh, look...!" she cried suddenly....
"Here's my brother Glint and his buddy Toby...!"
"Hey, Toby...!" she yelled....."Don't get caught in the wheelie thing..."
"It's not a 'wheelie-thing' Toby said scathingly...
it's a 'Tread-wheel' and if you don't watch out
we'll tie you to it...." he threatened, clearly exasperated.
Meanwhile, Glint, if that was his name,
was clearly fascinated by the mortar mudhole...
and was about to make a mucky mess....
"Okay, that's enough..." I said sternly...
"You guys are not really helping here
and I need to get on with the painting....
you need to find somewhere else to play...."
and just like that they disappeared......!
Suddenly it was almost a breeze to get the rest of the faces painted.
In the peace and quiet I could concentrate on one tiny
(and I do mean tiny!) little face at a time.
They do look sort of like her brothers...
just wait 'til they get their shoes... you'll see!
Of course, I got a little hasty and botched the last little face.....
had to start him over again...
First the white paint then the flesh paint
then shadows then details......
but I think I got him now!
It's one of the things I really like about the original painting...
those workers all really have different characters!
But yes, I still have a lot of details to go.
And if I have been babbling more than usual, Dear Readers,
you can blame it on The Tower of Babel itself....
the origin of much confounding confusion
throughout this world!
