Summary:
There is monstrous magic in Theodore Gericault´s huge argument in oil. The public, with political furore still raging over a disaster at sea, went mad at the time, but the vast creative influence the painting had then and the echoes that resonate to this day are enough to send a chill up your spine.

Details or Sample:
Tales of the rescue and the horrors that preceded it held France in a dangerous grip. Guilt stalked the streets in search of fresh victims.

Gericault, then 25, found himself obsessed. For months the great painter wrestled with visions, and by the time he decided in late February 1818 that he would have to commit one of them to canvas, he was so committed that he shaved his head like an ascetic and hung a sign on his door forbidding all entry apart from his students and models (among them his friend Eugène Delacroix, who is the figure in the foreground with his face to the ground and arms outstretched).

First he studied scenes of battle, torment and death in the works of the masters, like Michelangelo, Rubens and Gros, searching for the appropriate expressions for his subjects.

He painted furiously, one version after another, from a scale model of the raft, wax models of the survivors and sketches of severed heads and dissected limbs he´d made at the morgue of the Hospital Beaujon. He must have played out every human emotion in reliving the terrors of the raft and the hopelessness of its abandoned occupants. He could not possibly have fended off conclusions about exactly where the blame lay.

Initially he placed the raft farther away from the viewer, its passengers facing out toward us. Then he turned them around so they were looking into the distance and brought the raft nearer, practically putting us on board. He wanted our sympathy. An earlier version almost had us in their midst, with victims both near and far stationed at the alert as a small boat approaches. In the final version that boat has slipped away on a current of literal disillusionment.

The horizon isn´t horizontal, it´s a plunging recession, and Gericault bolsters the drama by vastly foreshortening the scene, the nearest figures pushing the horizon even further back. A tiny gap separates the men from the distant speck that signifies their ability to live on, love again, lust another day.

The resulting effect, which seems to have been deliberate, is that the men´s straining for salvation is all the more acute. The rescue vessel pulling away draws on their muscles like the rope in a tug-of-war against some colossal promise being stolen away. Their grasp on survival is excruciatingly taut. Even the spectator is left breathless watching the struggle.

What finally emerged nevertheless, as author Julian Barnes discovered in researching his own version of events, was equivocation. Gericault was fearfully cautious in trying to avoid an encounter with the nationwide controversy at the core of the story. He opted to shun the political, the symbolic, the theatrical, the shocking and the sentimental, and in doing so told a lie.

A 35-square-metre lie.

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