THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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in the fairytale, namely with regard to the fairy­like quality and even the peculiar exoticism which the architectural picture also lends to the buildings of its own age and of
its own country. But the wishful building in the architectural picture — precisely as a shaped work of art sui generis — is related much more sharply than the wishful
building in the fairytale to architecture that can be optically strolled through, referring to it concretely, indeed painting it on the wall.
Painting on the wall ultimately means condensing architectural forms. Moreover, into types of building which cut across all styles; as for example the house, the pleasure
seat, the high tower, the temple. Let us select two of these always also archetypal forms of building here in the architectural picture: tower and temple. The painted
images of these two are all the more vivid as they simultaneously touch on very old, legendary pre­images of architecture. The two examples of this are Brueghel's
archetype: the Tower of Babel, and then, in a very different age, beneath a very different sky, the Assisi frescoes from the school of Giotto, which conversely picture a
kind of civitas Dei with the archetype: Solomon's temple. Brueghel presented the oldest, bitterest of all architectural fantasies in the ‘Tower of Babel’. He painted this
Promethean structure in two versions, both times, corresponding to the Baroque, with a perceptible echo of a stage aspect. In the Rotterdam picture a kind of
colosseum rises unfinished in fifteen storeys, between a hill­town and the sea; the heights of the building are surrounded by clouds. The Vienna picture, retaining the
curve of an amphitheatre, with arches, windows, gates and balconies on the illuminated left­hand, almost already developed side, adds a vast rocky landscape as a
foundation for the building, and portrays the hubris in other ways too with greater severity: — a safe stronghold is our Lucifer.* The rebellious structure itself (Genesis
II, 1–9), as everybody knows, only appeared as a fragment, though as a fragment which represents the work of Prometheus and Icarus in the Bible. The story, which is
Yahwistic, has the same author as the tale of paradise; it was probably also originally connected with the tale of the lost paradise. But the entrepreneurial ideology of
early capitalism and the varied ideology of the manufacturing period now supervened: the building that reaches up to heaven certainly lay close to the heart of the age of
Faust, with its receding sense of sin. Following Paracelsus, Baroque theosophy also restored the connection of the tower­building motif with that of the Fall, and
furthermore — a fact which is important for wishful
* A reference to the Luther hymn: ‘Ein'feste Burg ist unser Gott’