The Temptation of Jesus
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Luke 4:7
The passage
If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.
Luke 4:7
About this plate
A bare rock summit, drawn as a single dark mass against an enormous pale sky. Christ stands on it, robed, still, a faint halo. Behind and slightly below him crouches the devil, winged like a bat, one arm thrown out across the view. Far beneath, a plain runs to the horizon with a caravan on it the size of a thread.
The composition is a sales pitch. The devil is not attacking; he is presenting. The gesture is a hand sweeping over a landscape, and the landscape is the whole of the visible world, drawn small and hazy and desirable.
The verse is the offer itself, and it is remarkably short: If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine. Eight words of business.
What Doré catches is that neither figure is moving. There is no struggle in this picture. One of them is talking and the other is looking at the view, and the drama is entirely a matter of how long the looking goes on. The bird flying low across the plain is the only thing in the frame with anywhere to be.
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