Apple #701: The Shape of the Heart

Valentine's Day approacheth.  I've already done an entry about the origins of Valentine's Day -- which, by the way, is far more bloody and insane than anything our capitalism-saturated culture could have come up with today.

Since I've already done that, I thought, what about the heart shape that we draw?  It bears pretty much zero resemblance to our actual anatomical heart in our body.  I know that we were drawing the heart shape long before we had an inkling what our anatomical heart looks like, so it's no surprise that the two have little relationship to each other.  So where did we get the idea for that shape? 

  or  
Heart symbol                                                  Model of an anatomical heart
(Image from Wikipedia)                                   (Image from Heart Research UK)





Well, so I've done some reading. 

How we came to draw the shape of the heart the way we do, and how it came to be imbued with all sorts of metaphor and symbology -- my heart, my love, my sweet, my dear -- is one of those things that happened slowly, over time, and yet also in so many different ways, nobody can put a precise time stamp on what happened when, or first.

So we don't really know exactly how we came to draw that heart shape and call it what we do.  We just keep drawing it and equating it with love.  But, every once in a while, people like me get curious about where that symbol came from, and they try to figure it out.  They come across the multitude of theories but settle on one or two that they like the best.

It is my theory that the story you think is the most accurate about where the heart shape came from actually says a lot more about how you define the nature of love than it does about history or facts or anything like that.

So, of the theories I am about to present, which one will you decide is the most accurate?

Greek Ivy

• A cardiologist -- I am not making this up -- named Dr. Armin Dietz who is also interested in these sorts of things says that the earliest pre-cursor of the heart shape was on Greek tombs and in Greek vase painting (amphorae).  He says people covered their vases & tombs with depictions of ivy, which was supposed to be symbolic of eternal love.  

Ivy in real life: green, stubborn, persistent, hard to eradicate. A good metaphor for love?
(Image from Wikimedia)

• If you think about the properties of ivy, this would seem to make sense.   Ivy is constant, will attach itself to a thing and not let go.  It is very hard to kill. You can cut away the leaves and stems but it will simply begin growing again.  You can imagine someone saying to his or her loved one, with that ivy plant, "So too my love for you."

• This is an intriguing thought, but based on things I've read elsewhere, I think this cardiologist dude might be a little off track.  Because ivy was associated with Dionysus.  The god of wine and theatre and debauchery and all that.  Where he's connected with ivy is that it's a symbol of life, vibrancy, passion, and immortality.

 
Here's Dionysus, god of wine and theatre and ecstasy, crowned with a wreath of ivy.  Note that the shape of the ivy leaf is similar to our heart-shaped symbol today.  Note also the pine cones to his left and right.  Pine cones will come up again later.
(Image from Greektheatre.gr)

• This last bit about immortality is the important part.  Because archaeologists have found various ancient Greek wreaths made with ivy or coins depicting people wearing crowns of ivy, and they are not generally described as being expressions of someone's undying love.  The wreaths were either intended to be worn during a Dionysian festival, or for a funeral.

• The idea, so far as I understand it, was that the ivy was supposed to represent a wish that the person who had died would enjoy immortality -- literally, enjoy it with Dionysus and lots of wine and so on -- rather than that the living person's love would be immortal.

• So I think this cardiologist dude might be a little off the mark.  But in missing the mark, I think he's probably expressing his own ideas about what love is:  Immortal.  I would think a cardiologist would unfortunately see a lot of people die, so he's probably hoping that true love would outlast even that.

Medieval Allegorical Hearts

• The postscript to the whole ivy idea falls in this part of history.  Dr. Dietz and others say that early Middle Ages monks who were illuminating manuscripts turned the ivy leaf upside down and changed the color from green to red, to symbolize warm blood, good health--oh yeah, and love.  He says you can see that transformation happening on religious manuscripts and also on playing cards.

• So one theory about this time period is that the monks were copying the Greeks, just updating the ivy with their new favorite color, red.

• But I'm not sure that theory holds because different monks/artists were making their hearts look like all different kinds of shapes, depending on where they lived or what they were writing about.

• One of the earliest-known drawings of a heart is in the illuminated letter S shown below. This is from a French manuscript made some time around 1250 A.D., and it shows a kneeling man offering his heart to his lady-love.

From the 1250-ish French manuscript, Roman de la Poire, here depicting a lover kneeling before the woman he loves, offering her his heart.
(Sourced from Wikipedia)

• That's a weird looking heart by today's standards, isn't it?  It's kind of flesh-colored, he's pointing the pointy end at her, and it's rather unappealing all the way around.  It looks like he went out, killed a goose, pulled out its liver, and that's what he's presenting to his lady-love.  In response, she's saying, "Ew! What the hell? Get away from me with that thing!"

• But the more I look at it, the more I think this depiction is kind of great.  Our love is human, and therefore of the fleshy realm, and sometimes it can be embarrassing or unwanted or unpleasant.  But it is still the very core of us, the thing that makes us live as nothing else does.  

• The theory about this shape is that it's based on very rough ideas of the heart's anatomy plus what emotional properties people attributed to it, so it is some combination of the anatomical/physical and the spiritual.  Most of these early depictions of love were allegorical -- as this one is -- so the monks were combining earthly love for people with the concept of spiritual love.  So I suppose it makes sense that their hearts would look like something combination of the fleshly and the imaginary. 

Medieval Upside Down Hearts

Adrea Pisano's Charity (Caritas), one of the bronze panels on the Baptisterium in Florence, c. 1337.
(Image from Wikipedia)

• Another early depiction of someone holding their heart is on one of several bronze panels on a door, in Florence, made around 1337.  Here, Charity is shown holding her heart in her right hand.  It is upside down by our reckoning, and cone-shaped.  

• (What she's cradling in her left arm I have no clue.  It looks like a dragon, but I think, based on things I've read elsewhere, it might be a water lily. The lily was sometimes a symbol for motherhood, and Charity was often shown suckling children at her breasts. But I'm totally guessing here.)

• This point-up orientation started showing up in the 1300s, but went away again in the next century when people went back to drawing hearts with the point down. 

• The explanations for the point-up orientation are extremely varied and, I think, probably our modern-day perspective laid on top of what the monks were actually thinking.  Because many of the point-up theories are sexy-dirty.

Naked Body Parts 

• There are all sorts of various theories that our heart today looks the way it does because it resembles some part of the loved one's body -- her breasts, or his testicles, or her bottom, or her genitalia from the mons to the labia and the clitoris. 

Imagine this turned upside down so the point is pointing up. OK, now think of various bits of naked anatomy.
(Heart shape from The Graphics Fairy)



This is a Renoir painting, done in 1918-1919, so much, much later than when the Medievalists were making their manuscripts. But this gives you several possible sources of the heart shape in one painting.  Could the heart be based on the shape of a woman's bottom, as shown at right?  Or is it perhaps the shape of her breast, like the one that comes to a very defined point at left?   Or could it be based on both breasts together, as shown at center?
(Renoir's Grandes Baigneuses from France This Way)



HEY! GOOGLE CENSOR MORONS! THIS IS FROM ONE OF THE FINEST WORKS OF SCULPTURE OF ALL TIME! MICHELANGELO'S DAVID! You idiots.  OK, readers, if you want to see the image -- no, wait, they put up the censor thing over the original source image too. Jackasses.

I don't want to leave out the male anatomy from this discussion.  Here is a zoomed-in shot of a reproduction of Michelangelo's David's specials. If you imagine the heart shape turned point up, you can see how the bulges at the bottom of the [I'm going to use a phrase that won't attract prudish people's attention] pair of round items might correspond with the bulges of the heart.
(Photo from Colors Magazine)

Now I'm going to post another photo that has nothing to do with anything.



Here is a perfectly ordinary bit of sculpture.

• The thing is, with all these body parts arguments, I'm not sure they apply to the monks and artists of the Middle Ages.  I'm sure there are those who would say, oh, those monks, since they were celibate and all, they were probably horny like crazy, so they were probably thinking dirty thoughts all the time.  So they were just looking for an excuse to draw dirty things and then cover that up by calling it religious or spiritual.

• Well, maybe.  But that argument seems pretty far-fetched to me. And I think we're putting our modern-day sexy thoughts on top of what people were thinking about in the 1300s and 1400s.

• Especially since these theories about the heart shape depicting naked body parts were not proposed until the 1960s or so.  When people were thinking a loooooot about sex.

Like a Pine Cone



Giotto's allegory of Caritas, from his fresco depicting the life of Christ, circa 1305. She is giving her heart to God above and demonstrating this by giving food to people below.
(Image from Wikipedia)

• Here's another depiction of Charity (Caritas), this time by Giotto.  She's holding up her heart, and again, it's got the shape of a smooth, spherical pine cone.  Nothing about her looks especially sexy, and neither does her pine cone heart.

• There's that pine cone shape again.  What's up with that?

• In the 1300s & 1400s, people were verbally describing hearts as being shaped like pine cones.  This was based on people having seen actual anatomical hearts in cadavers. But maybe they only sort of saw the actual hearts.

Here, again, is what an anatomical heart looks like.
(Image from Heart Research UK)



And here's your typical pine cone.
(Image from Wiktionary)

• I'm not seeing that much of a resemblance, are you?

• I haven't found anyone who explains why it was necessarily a pine cone, as opposed to some other natural object, which people used to describe the shape of the heart.  

• Could it be, they were thinking of Dionysus and his pine cones?

(Image from Greektheatre.gr)

• Nah. Probably not. Most likely there's no buried psychology here, only an effort to try to liken this weird, bloody, no longer pulsing thing to anything else they knew of in nature, and the nearest thing they could come up with was a pine cone.

• So I would say these pine cone-heart-depictors were doing their best to try to be as realistic as possible.  They were mainly drawing or painting these hearts in a religious context, so I'd guess they were trying to say, look, here's what this very human thing which also has the rather amazing capacity to love spiritually looks like.  And here's what it looks like to give this human pine cone love-thing to God. Or to one of His representatives.

Right-Side Up Hearts from Medieval Times Onward

• Depictions of the heart got flipped around so the point was pointing down some time in the 1400s. One of the earliest depictions like this comes from Francesco de Barberino's illustrated text, Documenti d'amore, first published around 1320.

Title page from the Documenti d'amore, c. 1320, a collection of poems and other literature about love, taken from various authors including Dante etc., along with illustrations in miniature.
(Image from Google eBook version)

• Yes, that overlaps in time with the upside-down depictions, but society in those days wasn't like it is today, where everybody sees the same thing almost instantly and everybody immediately starts copying the new fad.  This was one of the first instances of the pointy-end down heart, that also had kind of a pinched-in curve to it.  It was this shape that became the predominant one going forward, rather than the spherical pine cones.

• Perhaps the reason this is the shape that took hold is because this one is most closely associated with earthly, romantic love between people.  It's not about allegorical love for God, or some wish for immortality; it's a straight-up, I Love You heart.

• There were still depictions of religious hearts -- the Sacred Heart of Jesus, for example -- but more and more, these were drawn or painted with two bulges on top and the point at the bottom.

Depiction of the Five Wounds of Christ, from the Waldburg-Gebetbuch in Stuttgart.  Looks like contemporary art, you say?  Nope.  1486.
(Image from Wikipedia)



Heart-shaped book of hours, from either the 15th or 16th century (the page where this was posted is not clear about which image goes with which caption).
(Image from Damien Kampf)

• But more and more, depictions of the heart were used in situations that were less religious and more often romantic or secular.  And they all used the shape we've all now come to expect.

Sheet music for a love song, "Belle, bonne, sage," in the shape of the heart as we draw it today, from The Chantilly Manuscript, c. 1350-1400.
(Image from The Public Domain Review) 



German deck of playing cards, 1545.  Note that the heart suit looks like a heart, while the I'd guess to be spades looks like ivy. 
(Image from Wikipedia)



Emblem of two hearts on fire, from Devises et Emblemes Ancienees & Modernes, in 1699. This might be another one of my favorite depictions of love. We are our hearts on fire, traveling over everything and zooming through space and time together.
(Image from The Public Domain Review) 

• So the upshot is, I don't really have a hard-and-fast, historically verified explanation for you.  Disappointing, I know.  The best I can offer you is a depiction of what happened to the shape in artwork over time.  

• But I think, having reviewed that progression, that it does boil down to the same thing: it's all an effort to represent the heart as some combination of the physical, anatomical thing that the organ is inside us, as well as a symbolic depiction of the emotion we feel.  Whether it's spiritual love for God, or drooling lust for someone's shapely body, or a burning desire for another person's inner being, we've found a way to represent that. And we've managed to do so with one shape.  I think that's pretty cool.

(Vector from All-free-download)


Sources
Listverse, 10 Theories on the Origins of the Valentine's Heart, February 8, 2013
Skeptics Stack Exchange, Is the heart symbol based on female anatomy?
Heart Symbol & Heart Burial
Theoi Greek Mythology, Dionysos
Art & Critique, Giotto, Virtues and Vices: Charity
Tumblr, Greek Ivy Wreath and the captions thereon
James Peto, The Heart, pp 28-29
Keelin McDonell, Slate, The Shape of My Heart, February 13, 2007
PBS American Experience, Timeline: Heart in History

Apple #699: Gustave Doré

Last week, we read about the albatross, especially the bird's appearance in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  You may remember that I posted an engraving of the albatross from that poem by Gustave Doré.  That reminded me that I've been meaning to do an entry for a long time about Doré.  Because this guy is The Man when it comes to engravings.



This is from the beginning of Paradise Lost.  Satan has just woken up, discovered he's not in heaven anymore but rather has fallen into some burning lake, and he's talking to his old pal Beelzebub (standing, looking dire), with whom he recently fought a war against God and lost.  They're just about to hatch their plan to round up the other fallen angels and keep the fight going on earth.
(Engraving by Gustave Doré, of course, sourced from Art Passions)


His engravings are incredible.  Tempestuous, chock full of detail, passionate as the day is long -- and he made a ton of them.  

I've always meant to find out more about him.  So now is the time.



Young Gustave Doré
(Photo by Félix Nadar, sourced from WikiArt)

• Gustave Doré's full name is Paul Gustave Louis Christophe Doré. But you can call him Doré.

• He was born in 1832, in Strasbourg.  That's in Alsace-Lorraine, which is that part of Europe which is kind of French, kind of German.  He spent most of his life in Paris, though.

• He was the son of a wealthy engineer (seems like a contradiction in terms for the times), and he was extremely quick on the uptake in all sorts of things.

• His earliest known drawings were ones he made when he was 5.  At 12, he carved his own set of lithographic stones, complete with companion stories for each.  By 15, he was doing caricatures and drawings.

• While on a trip to Paris with his parents, they passed the window of a publisher where some illustrations were displayed.  He pretended to be sick, told his family to go on without him, got out his sketchbook and made his own versions of the illustrations in the window.  Then he went inside, set his illustrations on the publisher's desk, and said, "This is how those illustrations should be done."  

• The publisher thought this kid was rather full of himself, but all the same he was stunned at the skill of the drawings. Skeptical that this kid who looked about 10 could have drawn so well, he asked the kid to make some more on the spot.  So he did, in seconds.  

• The publisher--Charles Philipon was his name--was so impressed, he would not allow Doré to leave his office.  He had someone find Doré's parents and offered Gustave a contract then and there, for the next 3 years.  

• So Doré moved in with the publisher, and Paris became his new home that day.  By the following year, he had become one of the highest paid illustrators in the country.

• He became famous as the "boy genius," and published a book at the age of 16.  He wrote all the text and did his own illustrations, some of them engraved in stone.

• Over the course of his teen years, he drew some 2,000 caricatures.  That's about 500 caricatures per year.

One of Doré's multitudinous caricatures.  These are opera singers. His caption was, "People who sing opera generate huge acoustic forces."
(Drawing by Doré, sourced from Prospect magazine)

• He soon became restless and began doing engraved illustrations for literary works -- all sorts of them.

• Such restlessness and the desire to keep working on the next project, and the next project, stayed with him throughout his life.  In addition to caricatures and engravings, he would also produce his own books, paintings, and sculptures. 

• But he remains best-known for his engravings.  So let's talk about those for a while.

From Dante's Inferno, this is Paolo & Francesca being spotted by Dante & Virgil.
(Engraving by Doré, sourced originally from A Lonely Philosopher (the page no longer exists), subsequently picked up by GoPixPic)

• His first real engravings project was when he decided he wanted to make an illustrated version of Dante's Inferno.  Folio-sized, meaning it would be enormous.  And therefore pricey.

• The publisher, Hachette -- yes, the ones now fighting with Amazon -- thought this would never sell, so they didn't want to do it.  

• Doré went ahead with it anyway.  He made 76 full-page engraved illustrations, and he paid all the costs to have the book printed.  Reluctantly, Hachette agreed to bind and sell the thing, but they made only 100 copies.

• Within only a few weeks, Doré received a telegram from Hachette saying, "Success! Come quickly! I am an ass!"  (when does anyone get such a note from their publisher?)  The Inferno had sold way more than the 100 copies almost immediately, and the book went into multiple reprintings. It has since been produced in over 200 editions.

• After that, Doré could provide engraved illustrations for pretty much any book he wanted to.  The list of books he illustrated is pretty staggering.  Here is an incomplete list:

• Dante's Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso
• The Bible
• Don Quixote
• Rabelais' complete works
• Perrault's Fairy Tales
• Baron Münchhausen (yes, Terry Gilliam got most of his ideas from Doré's illustrations)
• Arabian Nights
• Orlando Furioso
• History of the Crusades
• London: A Pilgrimage (social commentary)
• Balzac's Droll Stories
• Shakespeare's The Tempest
• Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• Tennyson's Idylls of the King
• Poe's The Raven 
• Dickens' A Christmas Carol

While Dante clings to him, Virgil pushes Filippo Argenti back into the River Styx, who will be subsequently torn to pieces by the other wrathfuls in the Styx. Kind of remind of you of Inferii, don't they?

(Engraving by Doré, sourced from The World of Dante) 

• Books are produced so quickly and easily today, you might be yawning and saying, "Eh, what's the big deal?"  Let me show you what's the big deal.

• Below is a video showing how copper engravings were made, a little before Doré's time.  He worked  mainly with wood engravings, but all the videos that people have posted about how to make wood engravings show people using electric, modern-day tools.  So while some of the processes involved in copper engraving are different than wood engraving, this gives you a pretty good sense of the amount of work involved in producing one engraving.  One.

•  The good stuff begins 36 seconds in.

• The guy in the video, Andrew, traces a drawing someone else made.  Doré wouldn't have done that.  He would have made his own drawing, and then made the engraving from there.  In fact, he drew right on the material that would be engraved -- wood or metal.  He didn't draw it on paper first.

• In copper engraving, you etch lines into the copper and the ink fills in the places you've gouged away.  Excess ink is wiped off, as you see Andrew doing in the video.  To get the ink to transfer onto paper, you have to use a ton of pressure to squeeze the ink out of the engraved channels onto the paper.  That's why Andrew has to put the copper plate into a rolling press.

Copper engravers also had to make mirror images of the thing they were engraving.  Here, the engraver is shown with the print propped up next to him and a mirror in front of him.  He is working from the mirror image of the design he wants to re-create on copper plate.
(Image from Steve Bartnick Antique Prints & Maps)

• In wood engraving, you cut away the stuff you don't want, and the ink stays on the raised parts.  No mirroring is necessary.  The block is pressed to the paper, but it doesn't require the same kind of pressures that copper plates do.  So wood engravings were relatively easier to print from.

• In about the 1820s, engravers figured out how to engrave on steel.  Steel was much more durable than copper, and more impressions could be made from a steel plate than from a copper one.  But since the material was firmer, it also required more force when being engraved.

• But steel's durability had another benefit, which was that it allowed the engravers to make extraordinarily fine lines very close together, without risking damaging the plate.  As a result, steel engravings allowed for incredibly sharp detail, sharper than on copper or on wood.  But to make such fine detail also required great intensity and focus by the engravers.

• Illustrators were having a great time making steel engravings, and the public were delighting in them.  It was in this environment that Doré was making his wood and steel engravings.

• There's another part to how engravings are made that I want to point out.  You'll notice that Doré's engravings are characterized by all sorts of fine lines running across the image.  This is true of engravings in general.  You don't ever really want to have any part of the plate unengraved.  The ink would blob onto that smooth surface, and it wouldn't transfer very well to the paper.  It would stick, and kind of suck at the paper as the paper was pulled away, and you'd get kind of a puckered impression.  

• So you had to engrave everything, including the backgrounds.  And you'd want to make the clouds distinct from the sky, or dark clouds distinct from light clouds, or a threatening sky distinct from the dark and scary mountainous peaks in the distance.  So all of those things would require fine-line engraving, and each background element would have to be engraved slightly differently so as to distinguish one from the other.

This is the famous engraving of Satan falling, from Paradise Lost.  Hopefully this is large enough for you to see the engraved lines going horizontally across the entire image.  They are especially noticeable in the dark clouds at the top, and in the lighter clouds at the earth's surface below.  Notice, too, how those horizontal lines continue across even as he's got shafts of light coming down diagonally through them.  And then, of course, there's the outline of Satan's body and the delicate curve of his wings, and specificity of his toes.
(Engraving by Doré, sourced from North Country Public Radio)

• Oh, and did I mention, the majority of Doré's engravings were done in wood, not steel?  Paradise Lost was one of the books whose engravings he made on wood.

• So think about carving a million teeny tiny lines into a block of wood with a tool that looks something like this:

This is one wood engraver's tool, called a spitsticker.  I am not kidding.  It is similar to the copper engraver's burin, but here the handle is mushroom-shaped, as opposed to the burin's L-shaped handle. Your palm cups around the knob of the handle, and your thumb and forefinger grasp the top, dull part of the blade.  The point of the blade is sharpened to a prism shape. It must be kept sharp throughout the engraving process, or you'll get ragged cuts in your surface.

(Drawing by Andy English)

• It is true that, later in Doré's career, he did have many apprentices working for him.  He would draw the initial design, and his apprentices would do the finished engravings. As I mentioned earlier, he would draw directly onto the plate to be engraved, whether it was a disc of wood or a steel plate.  The engravers would then follow his lines.

• But that said, his final tally is still impressive.  Pretty much every major work of literature published in the late 1800s, Doré made engravings for it. His catalog totaled over 200 books, with multiple illustrations in each, some numbering over 400 plates per book.

• Just when he was hitting his peak of popularity, color printing started becoming the next big thing.  It had been invented long before, but prints had to be colored by hand.  But around this time, people were figuring out that you could carve wood cuts or engravings, one for each color, and print them sequentially to create a multi-colored print. 

• People were wondering why Doré wasn't making any engravings that could be printed in color -- some have speculated that he was color blind.  Whether it was to disprove his detractors or to try the next thing, he took up painting.  The French said his paintings were really only illustrations in color, but others wondered why that was a problem.  

• His paintings were shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1896 to an enormous turn-out.  Over 16,000 people came to see the exhibit each day, totaling more than 1.5 million people in the 8 months it was at the museum.  This broke every previous attendance record the museum had.

Vivien and Merlin, 1867. Even in color, Doré hasn't lost his flair for the dramatic, for intense variations in light and shadow, and his love of tall knobbly trees.
(Painting by Doré, sourced from The Art Tribune)

• But tastes in the art world were changing, away from the overly dramatic, and toward Impressionism, with less grandiose subjects, and a lot more color.

• So when Doré died in 1883, people were already looking ahead to the next thing in art and illustration.

• But Doré's influence remains.  Some filmmakers say his illustrations "anticipated modern cinematography" for their use of dramatic light and shadow to highlight the central element in a composition, and they used some of his drawings as inspiration for composing their own scenes.

Doré's drawing of Baron Münchhausen
(Engraving by Doré, sourced from Wikipedia) 



Screenshot from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Anglicized spelling), brainchild of Terry Gilliam.  Gilliam relied heavily on Doré's illustrations to decide what the characters in his movie should look like.
(Screenshot sourced from Morgan on Media)

• Others in the field of literature say his illustrations marked the beginning of the horror genre -- particularly because of the engravings he made for The Raven.  But I would argue his horror-friendly tendencies were present long before then.

From The Raven, illustration corresponding with "Darkness there and Nothing more."  How many times in horror movies have we seen malevolent spirits crouching where the hero can't see them?
(Engraving by Doré, sourced from Art Passions) 



Spendthrifts running through the forest of suicides, from the Inferno. I think this just looks creepy.
(Engraving by Doré, sourced from The World of Dante)



The Mariner, on board ship after the entire crew has died, "And yet I could not die." Neither have tales of ghost ships traveling the oceans.
(Engraving by Doré, sourced from Art Passions)



Ugolino, gnawing on the brains of Archbishop Ruggieri, from the Inferno. It doesn't get much more horrific than this.  Maybe it's Dante who's to blame, more than Doré.
(Engraving by Doré, sourced from The World of Dante)

• He is also considered to have contributed to the founding of comic books and graphic novels.

Puss in Boots, looking as dramatic as Don Quixote.
(Engraving by Doré, sourced from Art Passions)

• So his influence lives on, even if nobody makes 'em anymore the way he used to.

Sources
Gustave Doré
Yovisto Blog, The famous illustrations of Gustave Doré
Dan Malan, Gustave Doré - Adrift on Dreams of Splendor, at Postaprint
The World of Dante, Gustave Doré
Art Passions.net, Gustave Doré Art Collections
WikiArt, Gustave Doré
Charles Solomon, The son of King Kong and Gustave Doré / Ray Harryhausen discusses his influences for creating some of film's most memorable animation, SFGate, March 19, 2006
Katherine Stauble, Gustave Doré’s illustrious imagination, National Gallery of Canada Magazine, June 10, 2014

Engraving
Andy English, How Wood Engravings Are Made
Norman Kent, The Woodcut Versus the Wood Engraving
AIGA New Orleans, Know Your Design History: Metal versus wood engraving, April 24, 2014
The Collation from the Folger Shakespeare Library, Woodcut, engraving, or what? February 7, 2012
Steve Bartrick Antique Prints & Maps, Information - Printing Methods - Engraving
Thomas Ross Collection, The Art of the Engraver and Etcher
The Virtual Instructor.com, Hatching and Cross Hatching [sic]
expertvillage, Intaglio Print Engraving: Intaglio Print Crosshatching [video]