Christ Feeding the Multitude
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Matthew 14:19
The passage
And he commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass, and took the five loaves, and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake, and gave the loaves to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude.
Matthew 14:19
About this plate
A plain under palms, filled to the horizon with people. In the near foreground, baskets are being passed hand to hand and a man is bent over one of them, distributing. Somewhere in the middle of the crowd is the small group with the loaves. The crowd itself goes back until the figures become marks.
Doré has drawn a logistics problem. There is no glow, no upraised hands, no visible miracle at all. There are baskets, and there is a queue, and it goes on further than the plate does.
Matthew's verse is a set of instructions, and it is worth noticing how many steps it contains: he commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass, took the loaves, looked up, blessed, brake, gave to his disciples, and the disciples gave to the multitude. Seven verbs, and the food passes through other people's hands before it reaches anybody's mouth.
That is the plate exactly. The figures doing the feeding in Doré's foreground are not Christ. They are men with baskets, working their way along a line, and the man who started it is out of sight in the crowd.
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