The Buyers and Sellers Driven out of Temple
Gustave Doré, 1866 · John 2:15
The passage
And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables;
John 2:15
About this plate
A colonnade, and a stampede coming down the steps toward you. Christ is high on the left with a knotted scourge raised over his head. Everyone else is falling: a man tumbling head-first, a money table going over, coins on the stone, a woman shielding a child, oxen and sheep shoving through the crush. At the bottom right a man crouches over a strongbox with both arms round it.
That man is the point of the plate. In a picture full of people running, one is staying, and what he is staying for is his box.
John is unusually specific about the equipment. Christ makes a scourge of small cords. He made it. There is a moment, unillustrated and unmentioned, where the most famous act of anger in the gospels is preceded by somebody sitting down and plaiting a whip.
Doré puts him at the top of a diagonal that runs the full height of the plate, so the composition itself does the driving out. Everything in the picture is on its way down and to the right, except the figure at the top and the man with the money.
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