This greeting on thy impious crest receive 

Gustave Dore created this engraving to illustrate Milton’s Paradise Lost. It shows a furious battle in the heavens, rendered with incredible detail through the technique of wood engraving. Consider the labor involved in this image: each line meticulously cut into the block, a testament to the engraver's skill and patience. The black-and-white contrast gives the scene a dramatic, almost theatrical quality. The textures of the angels' wings, armor, and the swirling clouds are all evoked through the precise control of the burin, the tool used for engraving. Engraving was a reproductive medium, and the scale of its distribution was massive. Dore’s illustrations, distributed through print, brought epic tales like Paradise Lost to a wide audience, bridging the gap between high art and popular consumption. The sheer volume of work involved in such projects underscores the industrialized nature of image production in the 19th century. We can read this print not just as an artistic statement, but also as a document of the era’s industrial capacity and its culture of mass dissemination.