The Gustave Doré Dover Books
Doré's Illustrations Of The Crusades
The Doré Bible Illustrations
(1997/1974 - Dover) 
Doré's Illustrations Of The Crusades In 1877, an English version of the French Histoire des Croisades by Joseph François Michaud, entitled HISTORY OF THE CRUSADES BY MICHAUD, was produced and contained 100 illustration plates by this artist. All 100 are collected and well-presented here in this tome. Each one is numbered and titled, with a short caption describing what is being depicted. The intended art-form being reproductions from wood-block engravings, know that the resulting intricate 'cross-hatching' is expertly used to create a seemingly endless gradient of gray-tones. For me, this unfortunately means that almost no piece has much negative space at all. With that said, while the images, for the most part, are not of the more miraculous subjects, like those you will find in the bible book below, they are interesting and diverse. There are two pages of introduction and a list of the plates. This book scores better than the others because it is a concise straightforward presentation of its art without more unnecessary froufrou.
The Doré Bible Illustrations As stated on the cover, there are 241 Doré plates on display herein. 24 of them are turned sideways, but the title page is a double-page spread of a detail extract and it works very well presented that way. Anyway, 217 pages are given, one page each, to the remaining images. Each one is captioned with a title and a short section of the bible verse being illustrated. All the well known bible stories are covered, but obviously many more, not known to those who are not devout, are given their due as well. The many fantastical subjects, leviathans, the destructions of cities and the smiting of enemies must have made bible study so much more enjoyable. As I mentioned above, the woodcuts make for darker pieces with little usage of light areas, but here a few times the very rare blank space is used effectively to convey the visage of an angel. My point is that the page after page of grays was taxing and only so many works could be studied at a sitting. (I think there's a reason why Pointillism isn't a more mainstream-embraced genre . . .) Most of the one text section serves as an introduction to the artist, but some detail is given to the impact (including the controversies) the publication of the Bible edition carrying his illustrations had on Europe & England at the time and what it meant for the artist.
Related Books
Other Dover monographs
Dulac's Fairy Tale Illustrations In Full Color
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