You are going to listen to a person describing his impressions

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Tapescript (Ex. 3B)
When I look at any of his paintings I find them fascinating... I can look at them for hours,
there is so much detail. He had a wonderful mind and he was obviously such an observer
of life. Er.. .he saw even the smallest details, the details, which, maybe, a cartoonist or a
documentary film-maker would see today.
Er.. .There is really a sense in which many of his pictures are like documentary records
of life in the Middle Ages, but the Tower of Babel is different... .the detail is there in the
attention to all the small things there, but instead of working from something that hes
observed, he is working with the Tower of Babel from a Biblical legend and he had to paint
the picture in his mind before putting it onto canvas.
What f see when I see the picture is...uhm...a monument to mans folly, the...uhm...belief
that man had that...he could reach the sky. And in the Middle Ages the safest way to do
this probably still seemed to the artist like it did in Biblical times to keep on building until
you reached the sky, you just built as high as possible. And that struck me in the picture,
in the picture you had that sense of a huge and massive structure reaching into the clouds.
You can see the clouds round the top of the building. But still its an impression of mans
folly and...thats where the confusion comes in.
The building - and this is a kind of cartoonists dream, because he is also a cartoonist -
the building is a mess. It didnt work because the people building it couldnt communicate
with each other and thats shown beautifully in uhm...this painting. So you get this strong
sense of...uhm....the picture of God smiling down at mans folly and men scuttling around
like tiny ants trying to achieve something which God already knows that man cant achieve.
Eschers woodcut of the Tower of Babel is a different thing altogether and the impression
I have varies. This soaring height of the Tower...but I also have this impression of an
extremely organized mind, a man who liked straight lines, a man who worked with
uhm...symmetry struggling to produce the confusion of the l ower of Babel in his picture.
And theres none of the chaos, total chaos which exists in Brueghels picture,
this...er...still its the tiny figures of men communicating or trying to communicate with each
other, but none of the sense of massive chaos which you get in Brueghels picture.