The New Jerusalem
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Revelation 21:1
The passage
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.
Revelation 21:1
About this plate
A high rock in the foreground, and standing on it an angel with one arm raised, wings back. Beyond and below, across a dark gulf, the city lies in light — a long bright band of walls and towers on the far side, with rays coming down over it through the cloud. A second figure stands beside the angel, small, looking.
The gulf is the composition. Doré puts the city where you cannot walk to it, and puts the two figures on a crag with nothing in between, so the whole plate is about looking across.
The verse is the beginning of the last vision, and its final clause is the strangest thing in it: And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.
No more sea. For a man writing on an island, in exile, with water in every direction and the sea as the thing keeping him there — that is not cosmology. It is the most personal sentence in the book, and Doré ends the Bible with a picture of a man standing on a rock, above the water, looking at somewhere else.
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