The Destruction of Sodom And Gomorrah

John Martin painted this fiery ruin in 1852, near the end of a long career built almost entirely on catastrophe. He made his name staging biblical destruction on an enormous scale, and Victorian crowds paid to file past canvases like this one as a kind of spectacle. Here two cities burn under a sky torn by lightning while Lot and his daughters flee into the foreground. His wife, told not to look back, has already turned, and Martin shows her at the edge of the light as she is lost. The tiny human figures against the wall of flame are the whole point. Martin worked in an age gripped by geology and by sermons on the end of the world, and he gave that fear a picture it could stand in front of.