Спад вод потопа

Thomas Cole painted this in 1829, the year he first sailed from America back across to Europe. Before leaving he had gone looking for scientific advice, asking the Yale geologist Benjamin Silliman what the earth might actually have looked like once the biblical flood drew back. The answer fills the canvas: a raw, stripped coastline seen from inside a cavern, littered with a broken mast, shattered trees, and a single human skull. Cole, an Englishman who had settled in the young United States, read the flood as more than scripture, as a force that scours away an old corrupt world and pulls back to leave a clean one behind. So he pushed the wreckage into shadow up close, and far out in the bright distance he set Noah's ark still afloat, with a dove crossing the light toward it.