Gericault – The Raft of the Medusa

Painting humanity under duress. Describing an event with all that is needed and nothing more.

Why would you call your ship ‘The Medusa’? The daughter of a Greek god, Medusa had snakes for hair and one look at her would turn you to stone. This doesn’t seem that portentous for a ship. And so it turned out. She was wrecked in 1816, with some 400 souls aboard. The captain, who had not sailed for twenty years, ran the ship aground on a sandbank. As seemed typical for at least another century, there were not enough lifeboats. So, around 250 people made it into a lifeboat, and 145 men and one woman were put onto a raft constructed out whatever timbers could be salvaged from the breaking ship. This became the infamous Raft of the Medusa.

What happened next was a nightmare. More of that later.

Géricault uses a sombre palette. The only red is in scraps of material, and it is subdued. All other colours are low saturation, various browns, pallid greens and dirty whites. The skin of the dead is tinged grey and green – Géricault spent time looking at cadavers to get these colours right. The focal point is the area of greatest contrast – where the excited man points to the distant sail. As you follow his gaze down the diagonal, you go from the greatest hope to the greatest disgrace. The dreadful condition of the survivors worsens as we travel along this diagonal, finally resting on this dead man.

Gericault’s painting, executed some three years after the event, is a mixture of horror and hope. The dead and the dying alongside the still living. The ripple of hope that cascades from the right. News of a barely-glimpsed sail on the horizon stirs the weak and sick. But as we travel further left, those already too weak, or dead, cannot fathom the news. One man cradles his dead son, either oblivious or uncaring now. Another man (at the base of the mast) cradles his head in more than mere sickness, more a dark madness engulfs him – it is easy to imagine him rocking to and fro, moaning.

The dark storm and tempestuous waves of the ordeal have not yet finished with them, despite the glimmerings of light and calmer skies appearing on the horizon. The raft’s sail drags them further into the storm, away from the ship’s sail in the far distance. Two at the front of the raft, facing away from us, are signaling with scraps of material, surrounded by those straining to see, barely able to believe the news. The excited man’s news is too late for those in our foreground.

Judging by the positions and pallor, fifteen people are still alive – more than the number that eventually made it to safety. The glimpsed sail of a ship shows a distance that is unlikely would reveal the raft’s small sail to the ship. The raft’s sail is taking them into the storm, not towards the other ship.

Géricault went to pains to be historically accurate. At this point, more than 130 souls have been lost during what became a 13 day nightmare.

And nightmare it was. They had ships biscuits which lasted a day. They lost their only water during a fight on the raft, relying on four casks of wine. In the end, as people began to sicken and die, the survivors resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. Both the wreck of the Medusa and this resulting ordeal became a French national disgrace.

The raft itself must have once been bigger – and Géricault does portray lower sections to the left and right of this main section, which sits just higher above the water. Was this position more highly prized, was it fought over. Is this how they lost their precious water so early in the ordeal? Most of the dead are gone, given up to the waves after whatever necessity was executed upon their bodies. The three bodies remaining on the raft are (from right to left), abandoned, mourned and… is that man half under the raft, or only half there? This is as close Géricault got to allowing himself to portray the ultimate horror of the experience.

In various faces Géricault gives us hope, excitement, relief, concern, depression, disbelief, resignation and death.

The painting made Géricault’s reputation. It’s monumental size and subject matter were a sensation. A painting like this does something that could never be achieved in a photograph (should that technology have existed at the time). It portrays in a single scene the range of emotion that existed in the ordeal. It puts representatives of each type of survivor and victim into a cohesive whole. It captures the moment of seeming salvation and its effect. It shows the dark horror of the situation in uninviting colour, the relentless power of the sea, the dark storm of mental anguish, and the way those still able would grasp at life, enduring and inflicting the unimaginable, waiting for this moment, this glimmer of hope.

A great painting can bring us to the point where we imagine our own actions, our own reactions. To what point would we bring ourselves? Where is our line? What would we do?