III.—An Unrecorded Map of London

Extract

The story of the Tower of Babel appears to have been a popular subject with the sixteenth-century Flemish painter Martin van Valckenborgh. He painted it on wood, he painted it on copper, he painted it on a large scale, as in a version at Budapest, he painted it on a small scale, as in a little copper version once in the collection of Charles I. William Beckford had one in his collection at Lansdown Tower, and it was described in such detail when his daughter sold the Tower and its contents in 1845 that it can be almost certainly identified with one that came up in a sale in Vienna nearly sixty years ago, and yet another version, also on copper, was recently acquired by the London Museum (pl. xxxvii).