June 15, 2017
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Babel
Breugel's Tower of Babel is visiting Japan, which is fine and a great opportunity to see a famous work of art. This is a fantastic painting, full of amazing detail. It was interesting that this rendition of the tower is very similar to the Colosseum in Rome.
I have a problem with the Japanese interpretation of the picture, though. There is a tendency here to allow imagination to run free and to impose one's own misinformed interpretation on things Western without taking the actual original cultural context into account. Opinion becomes fact. Whereas the Tower of Babel story is a story of God's judgement, this biblical interpretation was totally exchanged for a humanistic message of the fantastic things that man can accomplish when all work together for a common goal. I think not.
