Babylon Fallen
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Revelation 18:2
The passage
And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.
Revelation 18:2
About this plate
A ruined colonnade under a broken moon. Huge blocks lie where they fell; a flight of steps leads up to nothing; the far wall is a black silhouette. Perched along the tops of the stones and the broken lintels are birds — large, hunched, unmistakably waiting. One flaps low across the middle of the plate.
Doré has drawn a city with the people subtracted. There is not one human figure in this picture, which is rare in his Bible, and the emptiness is what makes the birds read as an occupation rather than a detail.
The verse is where he got them: Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.
Is fallen, is fallen. The King James keeps the doubling, and the sentence lands twice. And then the imagery turns to tenancy — habitation, hold, cage — as though the ruin has simply changed hands. Doré draws the new tenants sitting on the masonry.
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