The Last Judgment
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Revelation 20:12
The passage
And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.
Revelation 20:12
About this plate
A vertical plate, and everything in it is moving up or down. At the top, in a great arc of light, Christ stands with arms out and ranks of figures behind. Below him an angel descends with wings spread. Beneath that the picture becomes a cascade of bodies — rising, falling, tangled, some reaching, some turning away — running all the way to the bottom edge.
Doré gives no ground. There is no floor to this picture and no horizon; the figures occupy the air, and the only structure is the light coming down through them.
The verse is one of the most restrained in Revelation, and its central image is stationery: And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened.
Books. After the seals and trumpets and beasts, the judgment itself is conducted by opening a record and reading it. Small and great — the sentence puts them in the same queue. Doré's crowd is drawn without a single mark of rank on it: no crowns, no armour, no robes of office, nobody clothed at all.
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