The Flood and the Returning Dove
Virgil Solis, 1565 · Genesis 8:11
The passage
And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.
Genesis 8:11
About this woodcut
The ark rides high in the middle of the picture, a plain box with a roof and rows of small square windows, and everything around it is drowning. Rain falls in ruled straight lines from a dark bank of cloud. In the water below, a horse goes under, a man clings to a rock at the left, and figures throw their arms up at the right. God appears in the cloud at the top. At the upper left, small and easy to miss, a dove flies with an olive branch in its beak.
That dove is the whole point of the plate, and it is put in the corner. Solis has compressed the flood and its ending into one frame: the judgment fills the picture and the mercy is a bird the size of a thumbnail. It is worth finding before you look at anything else.
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