The Creation
Virgil Solis, 1565 · Genesis 1:1
The passage
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Genesis 1:1
About this woodcut
God stands in the middle of the frame with both arms open, inside a burst of radiating lines, and the whole of creation is arranged underneath him at once. The sun is in the upper left, the crescent moon in the upper right, birds are in the air, fish are in the water at the bottom edge, and the animals of the land fill the lower third — a lion, a stag, a bear, a camel, all crowded together on the same slope.
Solis is not illustrating one day of creation. He is putting six of them in a single picture, which is what a printer does when he has one block per chapter and a whole chapter to cover. Look at how little room the animals are given: they are stacked almost on top of one another, and several are drawn from the printed animal books of the period rather than from life.
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