HOWZAT

Instinctively, he was searching for a contemporary event of sufficient scale, energy and universality to make a lasting impression. He had begun to look about, in the streets and in the press, for something to excite his desire for relevance. He had returned from an Italian painting trip searching for the kind of story that smacked of the moment, for an incident that thrilled the readers of the popular press of the day – one of those lurid news items that reported wide-ranging infamies, from criminal and sexual scandals to suicides, shipwrecks and cannibalism.

Alexandre Corréard and Théodore Géricault, meeting in the midst of this butchery, had both suffered devastating setbacks, had scandals hounding them, had secrets to conceal, and yet were determined to surmount misfortune: Corréard, tireless in his struggles for retribution and justice; Géricault, tackling his ambitious canvas with a fervour and single-mindedness that could be gauged from the hideous array of decomposing flesh with which he chose to populate his studio.

Catching sight of a bundle of studies for which he himself had posed, Corréard turned round to confront the large canvas on which Géricault had begun to work. He saw his own figure taking shape, centre stage, the star of the nightmare.

Géricault’s interest in corpses and human fragments was not merely anatomical, but also pathological. The Medusa project compelled him to observe the effects of deprivation and violence, and he made arrangements with the interns and nurses at the Beaujon to allow him to follow the phases of suffering on site, as well as to provide him with amputated limbs for studio study. Because exhumation and dissection were, from October 1813, forbidden outside the Faculty of Medicine, Géricault may have had to come by his limbs and heads in a roundabout way. It is quite possible that Henri Sevigny, through his medical connections, was instrumental in helping Géricault to obtain some of the amputated limbs. Géricault kept cadavers and fragments for weeks, and his friends became afraid of infection.

Géricault had settled on the most poignant moment in Corréard’s and Savigny’s scandalous narrative, a moment of hope that would evaporate, leaving the enfeebled survivors in despair. In choosing to paint the first sighting of the rescue ship, when the brig remained too distant to notice the raft, Géricault subtly reminded spectators of the culpability of the leaders of the expedition. By freezing that moment, the painter presented his public with a scene of great suspense. The unsaved were fixed at a point before the happy ending – before, at the 11th hour, rescue miraculously arrived.

Among the people who came to model for Géricault was the young painter Eugène Delacroix, who posed for the man face-down in the centre foreground of the picture. Delacroix remembered that The Raft of the Medusa had a terrifying effect in its unfinished state, and recalled that the “impression it gave me was so strong that, as I left the studio, I broke into a run, and kept running like a fool all the way back to the far end of the Faubourg Saint-Germain”.

Recent research shows that the three black men in the finished painting were introduced at a late stage in the composition. Their placing tells its own story. The one lying face-down, dead, over the haunch of the figure clambering from the deck, speaks of past despair. The second, placed significantly between Henri Savigny and the political agitator Corréard, looks up hopefully to the third, who is signalling optimistically. A counterpoint to the story of voyagers abandoned by their leaders, these three black men present the larger drama of a people passing from despair and victimisation to hope for an enlightened future. The artist had become not only a witness to the malfunctioning French administration, but also an advocate for a fundamental shift in human rights.

Théodore Géricault died on Monday, January 26, 1824, aged exactly 32 years and four months. Among the mourners at his funeral were his uncle, Baron Jean-Baptiste Caruel de Saint-Martin, and his wife, Alexandrine-Modeste. She had probably not laid eyes on her handsome and beloved protégé since the early days of her pregnancy. Their son, Georges-Hippolyte, would now be left alone in the world, aged five and a half, prohibited by all the pressure of propriety from meeting his mother, denied by fate from ever knowing his father and not even carrying his name.

© Jonathan Miles 2007

Medusa: the Shipwreck, the Scandal, the Masterpiece, by Jonathan Miles, is published by Jonathan Cape on April 5 and is available from BooksFirst priced £16.99 (RRP £17.99), free p&p, on 0870 1608080 or at www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

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