Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Tobias Verhaecht
Flemish; 16th-century, 17th-century
Antwerp, Belgium: Royal Museum of Fine Arts
43%
The Tower of Babel. Late 16th century. Oil on panel (with Jan Brueghel the Elder)
Not sure who did what, but I have to guess it's Jan's tower and background with Verhaecht's figures in the foreground. Regardless, the painting suffers from its surfeit of influences: there are the inventive landscapists art of the prior century (Patinir, met de Bles), the unbridled symbology of Jan's father (this picture holds no candle to Pieter's own famous Babel), the Mannerism that predominated in Flanders around the turn of the 16th century — and it's all barely synthesized. The real shame is the tower, which, though weirdly tinged with the grays and greens of things in distances in this style of art, has none of the intrigue of Pieter's crooked structure. Jan has centered the thing, set it far back in depth, complexified but also regularized it — it doesn't look defiant and dangerous, but sickly and neutered. Brueghel works better smaller and humbler; even if he hadn't been painting in his father's shadow, it's hard to imagine that the enormity of this scene wouldn't have been too much for him. (TFS, 2026)