The Biblical Scale of Gustave Doré

At the same time, they were seen as effectively capturing the built environments in which these narratives took place–the massive edifices of the Egyptians and Babylonians that archaeologists were uncovering for the first time. Despite these immediate perceptions, viewers familiar with the ancient Near East today will have no difficulty recognizing the creative anachronisms that pervade Doré’s Bible illustrations. His representation of Belshazzar’s feast, for instance, fuses references from Assyrian, Persian, and Indian architecture. But among the educated, lay readers who were the first audiences of these images, they offered the veneer of realism that had become a key characteristic of historical reconstructions. For detractors, or those more familiar with the realities of the sites represented, the images read as slapdash hackery, as dimensionless set pieces, or as misguided rehearsals of familiar misapprehensions.

Nonetheless, Doré visualized the breadth of the Bible with a level of variety and detail that had never been achieved by a single artist (though, as noted already but is important to reiterate, these were the product of collaborative efforts). But the question remains: why has Doré’s name fallen from the heights of acclaim it enjoyed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

In short, and as is often the case, Doré does not sit easily within traditional scholarly discourses. He established his career as an illustrator in the period when that profession was first being codified and from the start it occupied a marginal position within the art world. Nor does his style conform to the two ends of the artistic spectrum that are most commonly used to characterize his period; he had neither the progressive aesthetic ideals of Gustave Courbet or Édouard Manet nor the technical acumen of academic artists like Jean-Léon Gérôme or William-Adolphe Bouguereau (though he would more easily fit within the relatively conservative paradigm of the latter category).