Dore? Dore? epub Masterpieces from the Works of Gustave Selected from the Dore? Bible, Milton, Dante's Inferno, Dante's Purgatorio and Paradiso, Fontaine, Fairy Realm, ... Memoir of Dore? And Descriptive Letterpress

Gustave Dore is one of the marvels of nineteenth century art. The whole range of pagan and Christian pictorial achievement offers no more brilliant series of creations than that which issued from the inspired brain and sympathetic heart of this great Frenchman. His colossal imagination, his magnificent apprehension of all possible conditions of human experience, his lofty insight into the mysteries of spiritual existence as reflected from earthly actualities, entitle him to be classed among the great creative geniuses of all time. Who that has ever turned the pages of his "Dante" his "Bible" or his "Paradise Lost" can doubt thatD ore had it in him to become one of the great decorative painters of the world? What could be more splendidly spectacular than Dante's "Vision of the Empyrean" with its mystical luminous circles resolving themselves into the shining forms of celestial beings, or "The Angels in the Planet Mercury" with its rhythmical processional movement and its effect of supernal light flooding the lovely shapes that advance on the wings of the clouds? Where shall we find a more dramatic effect of composition than in "Satan in Council" ("Paradise Lost"), in which the dark foreground groups of demons form such admirable combinations of line and are so powerfully contrasted with the masses of light that centre about the throne of Lucifer? Such scenes as these, enlarged and painted on walls, instead of being depicted within the limits of dimension demanded by book-illustration, would have made of Dore a decorative master whoso creations might have been called sublime. How superbly decorative is his use of light and shade! It is to his wonderful instinct of contrast that many of his finest compositions owe their value. This pictorial sense, expressed in opposition of light and shade, is especially strong in the "Paradise Lost" and the "Dante".