Gustave Dor

These 135 fantastic scenes depict the passion and grandeur of Dante's masterpiece — from the depths of hell onto the mountain of purgatory and up to the empyrean realms of paradise.

An artist who worked across many media, the multi-skilled Gustave Doré remains unequalled as a supremely talented illustrator, whose detailed and imaginative engravings for major works of literature – from Cervantes’s Don Quixote to Dante’s Divine Comedy, and even the Bible – have hugely influenced the way we see many cultural and literary characters and still inspire today (David Beckham has a tattoo on his chest of Doré’s The Agony in the Garden). This sumptuous new introduction to the artist focuses on these illustrations, first introducing you to his life, work and the rich seam of illustration history that he continued and ignited, from Blake and Fuseli to today’s newspaper comics, before presenting a carefully curated thematic selection of his finest and most important engravings. From his vision of Jacob Wrestling with the Angel to Crossing the River Styx, the work of this most prodigious and much borrowed-from artist is represented in glorious full-page reproductions.

All 50 of Doré's powerful illustrations for Milton's epic poem, recounting mankind's fall from the grace of God through the work of Satan. Appropriate quotes from the text are printed with each illustration.

Detailed plates from the Bible: the Creation scenes, Adam and Eve, horrifying visions of the Flood, the battle sequences with their monumental crowds, depictions of the life of Jesus, 241 plates in all.

In a nutshell, Christianity is one of the greatest if not the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on people in the history of the universe. It is practically all fantasy of one sort of another that millions of people believe in all over the world and have done so for many centuries since Christianity began. It all could have been made up out of whole cloth. The Old Testament cannot be taken at face value as the creation story was most likely borrowed from other sources and adapted to fit with the author’s purpose of explaining how the world began. The Exodus may be entirely fiction and most certainly did not happen the way it is described in the Bible. As far as the New Testament is concerned, it was written decades after the crucifixion of Jesus by people who were not eyewitnesses to the events they described. There may have been a prophet whose teachings drew many followers, but there was certainly no virgin birth, no miracles, and no resurrection. The purpose of all the apocalyptic writing and second coming of Christ may have been motivated by the oppression of the Roman Empire where the Jewish people felt powerless and needed to believe in something that would provide them with a feeling that in the final analysis justice would be done and they would get their revenge. Thus, Christianity needs to be exposed for the fraud that it is which is what this book attempts to do by looking at the history of Christianity, Biblical scholarship, and other aspects of Christianity along with its alternatives.

London in the middle of the 1800s was a subject endlessly sketched by artists, studied by social reformers, and discussed by writers. This comprehensive collection of drawings by Gustave Dor,̌ France's most celebrated graphic artist of the period, presents a panoramic portrait of that engrossing city - from fashionable ladies riding in a sunlit park to ragged wretches in a shadowy side street. Here are amazingly perceptive sketches of workaday London, busy market places, the Christy Minstrels, a waterman's family, thieves gambling, the Devils' Acre in Westminster, flower girls, waifs and strays, a wedding at the Abbey, provincials in search of lodgings, a garden party, prisoners in the Newgate exercise yard, stalls at Covent Garden Opera House, and many other scenes that capture the London of a bygone era.

Illustrations to the Great Classics including Paradise Lost - The Divine Comedy - Idylls of the King - Don Quixote - Orlando Furioso.