The Deluge
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Genesis 7:23
The passage
And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.
Genesis 7:23
About this plate
A rock breaks the surface of a rising sea. On top of it, holding the high ground, is a tigress with her cub. Below her, and not on top of anything, are people: a man hauling himself up the wet stone, a woman half in the water lifting a baby toward the animals, another body face-down in the swell, a fourth already carried off. Birds wheel over the whole thing.
Doré has arranged the plate as a ladder, and put the beasts at the top of it. That is the argument, and it is a hard one. There is no ark in the frame and no God in it either — just a hierarchy of who can climb.
The verse is a list, and it is very careful about order: man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven. Doré draws the same census and inverts it, so the one at the summit is the one the sentence names second and the ones drowning are named first.
The child is the brightest thing in the picture. It is also the only figure being lifted rather than climbing.
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