Abstract
Beginning with the ubiquity with which art history discusses Pieter Bruegel the Elder's work as allegorical – and the Tower of Babel paintings are no exception – I offer a reassessment of this by contributing to the ongoing debates within Breugel studies on methodology, and, until now, outside of them, on Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory. Through a close reading of the paintings, the art historical literature on the paintings, and a philosophical interpretation of the Tower of Babel narrative, I intervene in the methodological debates by proposing an alternative conception of the dialectical aspects of Bruegel's paintings. I then suggest how an understanding of the dialectical character of the paintings, and a necessarily overdetermined hermeneutics of them, can add to our knowledge of Bruegel's work, and put pressure on our comprehension of Benjamin's writings on allegory and ruins.
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