Doré the Explorer

On the French illustrator’s uneven prints depicting the Bible.

It felt sacrilegious to thumb through the Christian Standard Bible (2022), skipping over the text entirely as I sought Gustave Doré’s illustrations. But that is exactly what I did—through some 1,850 exceedingly-thin pages.

Medieval illuminators filled biblical margins with “grotesques,” otherworldly figures that could often be animal-human hybrids, which…