The Resurrection
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Matthew 28:5
The passage
And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified.
Matthew 28:5
About this plate
The tomb from the inside, dark, with the doorway open to the left. An angel sits on the fallen stone in the middle of the chamber, wings up, lit from within. Away to the left, small in the doorway, three women have stopped on the threshold and are looking in.
Doré has drawn an empty room. There is no risen figure in this plate at all — only a slab, an angel, a door, and some space where a body was.
The verse is the angel talking, and the first thing he does is manage the fear: Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. Not the risen. Not the Lord. Which was crucified — the angel identifies him by the thing that has just happened to him.
And the women in this picture have not come to witness anything. They have come with spices, early, to finish a burial, and Doré keeps them at the door, small, still holding what they carried.
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