The Sermon on the Mount
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Matthew 5:7
The passage
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Matthew 5:7
About this plate
A hillside under trees, dense with people. They are seated, kneeling, leaning on each other, sprawled on the slope; children among them, women with infants, old men, and at the back the crowd simply dissolves into the foliage. At the centre, slightly raised, is a seated figure in white, and around him a close ring of listeners.
Doré makes him hard to find. There is no throne, no framing arch, no shaft of light — the composition puts Christ in the middle of a mass of bodies at almost the same scale as everyone else, and you locate him by the way the crowd bends inward.
The plate's real subject is attention. Every posture in it is a way of listening: chin on hand, head tilted, body turned, one man lying full length on the grass. Doré draws two dozen distinct ways of paying attention and puts them all on one slope.
The verse is seven words. In a chapter of famous sentences, this is the plainest one, and it is the only Beatitude where the reward is the same as the requirement. Mercy for mercy. Nothing added, nothing transformed.
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