The Tower of Babel

The paintings depict the construction of the Tower of Babel, which, according to the Book of Genesis in the Bible, was built by a unified, monolingual humanity as a mark of their achievement and to prevent their dispersion: "Then they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.'" God punishes the builders for their vanity by "confusing their speech" into different languages so that they could no longer communicate; however, in both paintings, Bruegel focuses on the construction of the tower rather than the biblical story as a whole.

The (Little) Tower of Babel in Rotterdam is painted on a canvas of half the width and half the height of The (Great) Tower of Babel in Vienna. The two paintings share the same composition, and modern X-rays reveal that the Tower in Rotterdam initially resembled the one in Vienna even more closely. However, the two paintings differ greatly in specific details, including the architectural style of the towers, the color palette and hues, the progress of the tower's construction, and the human figures in the scene. Most notably, the Vienna version has a group in the foreground, with the main figure presumably Nimrod, who was believed in some Christian traditions to have ordered the construction of the tower.

Bruegel's composition of the Tower of Babel, particularly in the Vienna version, is considered the most famous and widely emulated depiction; both paintings are regarded as among his best works, and are considered exemplars of his characteristically painstaking and "encyclopedic" attention to detail.