Christian Art and Iconography Guide: Dore

Description: lxii, 329 pages illustrations 33 cm
Responsibility: Illustrated by Gustave Doré. Edited with notes and a life of Milton by Robert Vaughan.

Gustave Dore stands alone: he had no predecessors, and he left no succesors. We say that the artist has his prototype; but every rule has its exception - even this one. Gustave Dore drew pictures because he could do nothing else. He never had a lesson in his life, never drew from a model, could not sketch from nature; accepted no one's advice; never retouched or considered his work after it was done; never cudgeled his brains for a subject; could read a book by turning the leaves; grasped all knowledge; knew all languages; found an immediate market for his wares and often earned a thousand sketches - an average of six a day; made two million dollars by the labor of his own hands; was knighted, flattered, proclaimed, adored, lauded, scorned, scoffed, hooted, maligned, and died brokenhearted. Comets may be good or ill, but wise men nevertheless make note of them, and the fact that they once flashed their blinding light upon us must live in the history of things that were. An Alsatian by birth,and a Parisian by environment, Dore is spoken of as of the French School, but if ever an artist belonged to no "school" it was Gustave Dore.

Of the great poets, Dante is one of the most elusive and therefore one of the most difficult to adequately render into English verse. In the Inferno, Dante not only judges sin but strives to understand it so that the reader can as well. With this major new translation, Anthony Esolen has succeeded brilliantly in marrying sense with sound, poetry with meaning, capturing both the poem's line-by-line vigor and its allegorically and philosophically exacting structure, yielding an Inferno that will be as popular with general readers as with teachers and students. For, as Dante insists, without a trace of sentimentality or intellectual compromise, even Hell is a work of divine art. Esolen also provides a critical Introduction and endnotes, plus appendices containing Dante's most important sources--from Virgil to Saint Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic theologians--that deftly illuminate the religious universe the poet inhabited.

One of the great joys of this book is in its presentation of early industrial architecture. In his views of working London, Dore shows us every place at the period of highest activity, full - even too full-of men and horses and machines, all moving at once. The backgrounds are masterly. The architectural details are sometimes incorrect; for instance, the Greek Doric cast-iron columns at St. Katherine's Docks are shown as Tuscan and given a texture that suggests stone. But the general impression remains: Pickle Herring Street with its warehouses, the crazy gangways high above the street, the glass dome and cast-iron columns of the Borough Market, the station on the newly opened underground railway, the Piranesian interiors of Barclay Perkins's brewery. Most memorable of all is "Over London by Rail", where the gigantic brick viaducts bestride the streets of mean houses and the engines shower soot over the tiny back yards hung with washing. With all its limitations and occasional absurdities, "London: A Pilgrimage" is a monumental achievement, and one of the great books of all time that deal with living cities.

What we finally admire about "The Ancient Mariner' is its evidence of the shaping imagination. The natural world of Wordsworth is the one we know, controlled by recognizable laws, even though the shadow of the God of Nature looms behind it. In Coleridge the natural world puts up with a great deal of supernatural goings-on and yet readers should have no difficulty in suspending their disbelief. The cracking of the familiar structure and laws of nature is brought about, after all, by an unnatural crime: if all life is one, the misbehaviour of its smallest organ must make the whole framework sick and demented. Coleridge shows us the terrible truths that are hidden behind ordinary phenomena. Thus "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is a book of revelations. The central revelation is the assertion that love holds the universe together.