Nautical Woes, Optical Flows, Soldiering Pros 

Where to begin with this one. Many of you will have seen this superb French painting before. And I’ll bet for some it’s an old favourite. It is of course The Raft of The Medusa. This is the stand out piece by Theodore Gericault which he painted as an earnest 27 year old between 1818 and 1819. Nothing else he did came close. You can find it in the Louvre in Paris. You can’t miss it. It’s just round the corner form the Mona Lisa. It’s colossal. 23 ft long and 16 ft high. This is a canvas which,  appropriately enough, could double up as the sail for a reasonably sized boat. And boating experiences are going to feature heavily as we dig into this painting. But not the reassuring ones that take place by soft riverbanks such as those extolled by Rat to Mole in the Wind In The Willows. Nor the cheerful buccaneering ones of a Jack Sparrow. Nope. We’ll be visiting darker places. Hellish, in fact. The incident that inspired Gericault’s painting is to my mind the most chilling account of depravity and despair of the 19th century. Because this is such an iconic famous painting and such a mindboggling story, we’re going to do a much deeper dive than usual. Both the thread and the posts will be long. I apologise for that. But there’s no other way to do this justice. These are not events that can be properly appreciated through a thumbnail description. Some of it is going to be a hard read too. When human beings are pushed into utter darkness, dreadful things can happen. Whether you dip in and out, or stick with the story to the bitter end, I promise you this much: you’ll never look at this painting the same way afterwards.

Because the picture is utterly inseparable from the events that gave rise to it, there is no point turning our attention to the canvas before we have a grasp of what happened to the French navy frigate The Medusa and her passengers in the summer of 1816 off the coast of West Africa. So for the time being we’ll leave the young Gericault alone in his studio and zoom out for an aerial snapshot of the time. Napoleon Bonaparte was gone from the helm of France. In his place, the Bourbon kings who were cast out by the revolution twenty five years before had returned. Louis XVIII sat newly on the throne and his followers were spring cleaning the country. The great army that marched with such devotion for Napoleon was dissolved and then reconstituted in a different form to sever its links with the past. Supporters of the monarchy whose families had fled abroad after the revolution were returning in droves to support their king and reclaim their place, or a form of it, in their homeland. As you might imagine, the tectonic plate of the monarchists squeezed mightily against that of the rest including Bonapartists, liberals and assorted others.

Louis XVIII, like any king keen to glue his backside to an uncertain throne, publicly promoted a spirit of reconciliation. Others around him were less forgiving. These hardliners were committed to a sterner form of monarchy. They thought Louis was too soft and liberal. As a result, they frequently took matters into their own hands. Hundreds across France were murdered as old scores were settled. A popular phrase emerged: ‘To know what true hatred is, you must first have lived through 1815.’ In an atmosphere like this, it was inevitable the best opportunities would be afforded to those whose politics were correct. This was not confined to top posts in the palace at Tuileries. It applied all down the food chain. The job security of anyone who had a lingering whiff of Bonaparte about them was precarious if they worked for the state. Tens of thousands were shunted aside to make way for men the regime could rely on. It wouldn’t be an injustice to point out that many of these new appointees were low on ability. And so we come to the forty four gun Pallas class navy frigate The Medusa, whose seasoned, respected and battle hardened captain failed precisely the above smell test. (Under his command, The Medusa played a role in a plan to whisk Napoleon out of the clutches of the Brits.) The captain’s replacement was a minor aristocrat in his mid fifties who had recently returned from Germany called Chaumereys. Chaumereys was a staunch royalist and therefore the right kind of fellow for The Medusa’s latest overseas mission. But he hadn’t sailed a ship in twenty five years. 19th Century France was about to be reminded of a straightforward truth: in a risky profession, if you recruit on the basis of favouritism rather than competence, there’s a good chance you’ll regret it before long.

Chaumereys was to lead a convoy of four ships to Senegal where the African colony would be reclaimed via treaty from the English crown. This was a minor but welcome redrawing of the imperial maps between France and Britain now that Napoleon was safely imprisoned on an island rock deep in the Atlantic. In preparation for the expedition, The Medusa was stripped down from forty four guns to fourteen to accommodate the nuts and bolts of a colonial administration. A governor and his family, bakers, engineers, teachers, doctors, apothecaries, writers and sundry others joined one hundred and sixty six crew and officers. A further one hundred and sixty soldiers and their officers brought the ship’s compliment up to four hundred. These men were to act as a garrison once the colony switched to French management. And it was amongst them that the horrors which followed were chiefly played out. They would have been no different to any other unit of the time: a gritty assortment  of conscripts, orphans, no-hopers, chancers, and professional fighters drawn from across Europe and perhaps the Americas. A portion of them would also have been veterans who had fought to the bitter end under their beloved Napoleon and put the fear of God into an entire continent. We’ll return to these men a little later when we try to understand the sort of terrifying group psychology that emerged on the raft subsequently. This was a rough crowd that carried within it some difficult baggage.

A microcosm of a fractured nation was aboard The Medusa as she put to sea from the port of Rochefort at the beginning of her journey. Tensions between Monarchists and Bonapartists were clear from the start. A number of officers aboard the vessel were dead set against the new captain who they felt had been foisted upon them by a regime that was contemptibly out of touch. Their scorn for the man grew as evidence of his incompetence began to mount up. He was aloof, deaf to advice, and blind to the shoddy discipline that blighted the ship more severely with every passing mile. When a fifteen year old boy fell overboard, the unrest spread from the officers to others. On a tightly run ship, his recovery might have been straightforward. But not on The Medusa under her new captain. The response was too slow and sloppy. The teenager was lost. For a superstitious group like the sailors of the time, this kind of unnecessary fatality would have been taken as a poor omen. Some would have felt they were aboard a ship that was ill-fated. It would quickly become clear that a suspicious, wary crew was never going to be mollified by a leader of Chaumereys’ indifferent calibre.

The captain was anxious to make brisk progress to Senegal. The Medusa was swift, and she was put to work on the open channels of the sea. She soon bolted so far ahead of two of the three other ships that made up the group that contact was lost. Convoys were not supposed to break up. Eyebrows were raised and murmurings began. This unorthodox move was compounded by foolish navigation errors. After a near miss with a reef and some other mishaps, it was clear to all that the captain was out of his depth. As he became aware of the low opinion in which he was held, a ballooning sense of self doubt consumed the unfortunate man. He was desperate to step back from the responsibility of plotting the ship’s course. But he was stubborn too. He could not bring himself to delegate such a responsibility to men he despised. Certainly not Bonapartists. Instead, Chaumereys passed the duties of navigation to a royalist loudmouth, a know-nothing passenger who declared he was familiar with the seas they were sailing and knew how to pick a path through them. This turned out to be an optimistic claim. The keys to the zoo had been handed to a monkey. To the despair of the experienced heads aboard, the frigate was soon speeding along on course for a vast and famously dangerous reef that lay off the coast of Mauritania. Unwilling to follow this hazardous path, the last accompanying ship pulled away and moved further out to sea. Before long she had disappeared from view. The Medusa was alone.

It was obvious to most of the men aboard that unless the situation changed, sooner or later they were going to collide with the underwater obstacles that now lay in their path. In the past, this had meant death for several crews of other vessels. The atmosphere aboard The Medusa grew unstable. Urgent efforts to persuade Chaumereys or his new navigator to take a better route made no impression on either man. When at last the seriousness of the situation became plain to the hapless captain and he roused himself to act, it was too late. In the middle of the afternoon, two weeks after leaving France, as she tried to turn for deeper channels, the frigate struck one obstacle below the waves, then another, and finally a third. She gave a great grinding moan and came to a standstill on a sandbank thirty miles from the coast. She wasn’t damaged badly enough to sink or break apart. But she was beached in merely a few fathoms of water at the height of a spring tide. The sea would only get lower. There was no chance of nature lifting the ship clear as it might had the calamity struck at the right hour just a day or two before.

Pandemonium broke out immediately. Chaumereys had no idea what to do and withdrew into himself. Any semblance of hierarchy and order evaporated. Over the following two days, various concocted efforts to free the ship came to nothing. Incredibly, the sensible option of pitching overboard the fourteen three ton cannons in an effort to float The Medusa a little higher in the water was rejected by the captain. He couldn’t face the prospect of answering for the loss of the king’s property. This kind of suicidal and nitpicking deference to a Bourbon monarch was just the thing to antagonise every Bonapartist aboard. Before long, the sailors and soldiers drank themselves into a defiant mob and ransacked the belongings of everyone else on the ship. Even the captain’s quarters were given a thorough going over. Once the dust settled, no one was punished. This sent a clear signal to all that discipline was optional. It is here that we get the first inklings of what was to happen later: men careening out of control in a spree of drunken thuggery. The incident also revealed a nasty glimmer of indifference to the norms that are essential if people are to survive difficulties together. This was an impulse that before long would surface again in a much more unpleasant fashion.

A decision was made to abandon The Medusa and row for the coast in the ship’s light boats. But there was a hitch. The six craft aboard the ship could take only two hundred and fifty people. One hundred and fifty others would have to be placed aboard a makeshift raft fashioned from masts, spars and other timbers stripped out of the main vessel. The raft and its occupants could then be towed behind the oared boats. Work progressed and gradually a hefty platform measuring sixty feet by twenty took shape on the water by The Medusa. No one liked the look of it. It was named ‘The Machine’. Lists were drawn up by the top brass allocating people to one boat or another. It soon became clear that most of the soldiers, the least popular officers and sailors, and a couple of dozen unlucky others would have to take their chances on the raft. Then, before preparations were complete, a heavy sea knocked The Medusa about so badly that she split open in places and started to take on large amounts of water. The thoughts of all turned to a speedy evacuation. Convinced they were about to be abandoned by people who feared and mistrusted them, the soldiers – drunk once more - took up their weapons, overran the ship a second time and readied themselves to murder anyone who might attempt to leave. A bloodbath was avoided only because someone spotted the makeshift raft had broken away from the ropes attaching it to the ship. The shock of losing the transport for one hundred and fifty souls jarred people back to their senses and The Machine was rescued.

The transfer off the ship was a mess. There was no clear plan. Leadership was sporadic and poor. Chaotic scenes took place where vital supplies intended for the boats were carelessly dumped overboard into the sea and lost. As the first forty troops were cajoled and then threatened onto The Machine by a crazed officer with a pistol in either hand, it sank so that much of the platform was a foot or more under water. Provisions previously placed on the raft were pushed into the ocean to lighten the load. To drink, two barrels of water and – predictably enough – six of wine were all that were kept. A tub of soaking wet biscuit was the only thing to eat. It amounted to a pathetic sixth of a pound per man – two thirds the weight of the underwhelming patty that makes up a McDonald’s quarter pounder. By the time the remaining passengers were aboard, one hundred and forty seven people were accounted for. Most stood in water up to their waists and the press of bodies threatened to shunt those at the extremities over the edge. At the centre of the raft things were a little better. The water came only to the knees. This area was occupied by officers and others in better standing than the bedraggled, volatile troops crammed against each other further out on the sea-sawing transport. A solitary woman, a sutler, who had followed Napoleon’s armies peddling minor wares and nips of brandy was also aboard with her husband.

It took some time, but eventually most of the other boats were roped together in a forward facing line and thence to the raft at their rear. Like a chain, each boat was the link to the one behind it. The rowers got to work. Dragging a submerged platform under the weight of so many men, however, was painfully slow. The reasons behind what happened next were contested by the survivors afterwards. No account is plain enough to earn our complete confidence. Broadly, it seems that after struggling under the tow-load for a time, one craft cast off its ropes to avoid colliding with another. In the ensuing confusion, the cables from the nearest vessel to the raft were chopped through. This was probably deliberate. It set off a sequence of confusion, the result of which was a call going up across the towing boats that the raft and its men were to be forsaken. The unlucky souls left behind roared and yelled desperately as their only hope of deliverance turned to specks in the distance. Without oars or a sail, with dozens scrambling to keep a foothold on the raft’s submerged timbers, they were abandoned to a heaving ocean. It was immediately obvious that this was not going to work out well.

Most of our understanding of what followed is thanks to a joint account written by two of the men who occupied the central area of the raft with the officers, one a junior surgeon and the other an engineer. Their names were Savigny and Corréard. Both can be seen in Gericault’s painting. While the horror and bloodshed of what they described was indisputable, when it came to their own behaviour, we can’t be certain these guys were always scrupulous with the truth. Anyone who made it to the end of the ordeal we’re about to explore had likely done things they’d rather weren’t publicised. It is no surprise that a subsequent account challenged what the two men claimed. It blamed them for orchestrating the worst of the violence themselves. It particularly singled out the young surgeon Savigny and The Medusa’s chief workman Lavillette, for their ruthlessness. Unfortunately, we don’t have the means to disentangle fact from massaged fiction in the details. But when it comes to the gist of things, the ground is reasonably solid.

As they were abandoned, the first thing to occupy the minds of the men aboard the raft was disbelief. Then vengeance. While the waves sprayed them senseless, they convinced each other they had been sacrificed in a premeditated move by those in the rowing boats. Whether true or false, this conspiracy theory was doing the rounds of soldiers who would have been sobering up from the alcoholic fug of the previous few days. Anyone who’s faced an acute crisis in tandem with hangover blues knows how quickly their feelings turn morbid. The Machine was not a cheery place. Yet, some sense of calm slowly descended. The only food – the wet biscuit mix - was divvied up along with a little under a pint of wine per man. A makeshift sail was set up where the officers stood. (It’s worth paying attention to this development; a good portion of those who would survive came from this small area of the vessel.) Then darkness fell. The weather turned treacherous and slammed the craft violently about. Ropes were lashed to spars so as to give people something to cling to. Even so, the men were flung against each other all through the night. Many readied themselves to die, and shouted goodbyes to their confrères over the crashing of the sea. When the sun rose and the waters calmed, a headcount was taken. Twenty had gone to their deaths.

The following day was calmer. The sturdier types fuelled themselves with more talk of revenge. Others, it seems, were already giving up. We are told that it wasn’t long before the hopelessness of the situation was too much for a baker and two teenagers. They threw themselves overboard. I’m suspicious of this snippet of information. It’s too sanitised. Was this the first outbreak of murder aboard the raft? We shall never know. The trio certainly weren’t the last to suffer. Others tormented themselves by imagining they could see land where there was none. All hoped desperately that the rowing boats might return. But they did not. As the day passed and there was no sign of rescue, efforts to keep up morale petered out. There was no food to lift the spirits. The solitary handful of sodden biscuit dished out the previous evening had been the only crumb to sustain these men in a thirty six hour struggle for survival. Most had been standing up to their waists in the sea since the start without sleep. Others tried to grab a few moments here and there held upright by the press of bodies. Scratches, cuts and gashes were made excruciating by the prolonged immersion in saltwater. Those with more serious wounds slipped in and out of consciousness for the same reason. People were ravenous, exhausted and terrified. Already a score had died. All of this was taking place in a claustrophobic crush. At any moment, a slip of the foot could be enough to tip a man headfirst overboard. It is hard to imagine a scene of more dismal tension. Packed together in unthinkable despair, this clump of wretched human beings was like a seven ton stick of dynamite waiting for a spark. Then evening came.

It would be difficult, I think, to imagine how events on that second night began without first trying to understand the nature of some of the people who were trapped on that half submerged tangle of planks. The soldiers who were about to take the story to an altogether darker place were not straightforward people. Most were the troublemaker sons of the 19th century’s dirt poor. Some had been conscripted unwillingly into the ranks. Others signed up to serve because a life which sported a good chance of being delimbed or minced on a battlefield was nonetheless better than what was on offer to them elsewhere as beggars, convicts, criminals or lowlifes. Those who had marched under Napoleon were used to things other men were not. They knew what it was to regularly walk in lockstep through hurtling walls of shrieking, heavy iron while their friend’s brains dripped off their chins. By the end of his reign, hardly a unit of the French army hadn’t been pushed by the emperor through the meat grinding gates of hell in one spasm of butchery and puke inducing horror or another. The soldiery were the plug hole through which the darkest waters of the age had been channelled. For the survivors of those carnivorous battlegrounds, the PTSD they experienced must have been indescribable. Drink and nihilism were the only realistic escape for many. The redeeming love of a woman or a child was something a large portion would never experience. The only man who had cared for them was Napoleon, and he was locked up on a tiny island thousands of miles away. They had to serve under a new generation that was opposed to their traditions and thought most of them were deplorable. In a nutshell, many people aboard The Machine were badly damaged goods, who felt their time had passed. Without determined leadership, they were quite capable of losing it and dishing out satanic violence in an instant. Sharing a space half the size of a tennis court with a hundred of them preparing for death and lusting for revenge would have been no way to pass a summer evening. And it wasn’t.

As darkness drew in, thick cloud gathered. A storm blew up and the sea churned like a rollercoaster. Once again the waves plucked the unlucky from the timbers and swallowed them whole. As The Machine was hurled up and down, the soldiers, believing they were soon to die, managed to force open a barrel of wine. They gulped down what they could in the chaos so as to ready themselves to meet their maker. Yet somehow, even as they drank, the majority clung on to the buffeted raft. Thanks to their empty stomachs and a second sleepless night, the wine quickly tipped a portion of them past the point of no return. They decided they’d had enough of it all. They resolved to cut the raft’s bindings so it would fall apart. At least then they could have death on their own terms and avenge themselves on life by taking everyone else with them. The officers and others clustered round the mast got wind of the plan and tried to put a stop to the madness. What started with blows from fists escalated in moments into something much worse. Axes, sabres and bayonets were taken up and a frenzy of stabbing and chopping began. It was the stuff of a horror movie. The men aboard The Machine butchered each other as if they were cattle in an abattoir. Bystanders who had nothing to do with the combat were treated as refuse and were tossed overboard into the darkness. The raft’s solitary female passenger, was amongst them. But she was luckier than many others. She was dragged aboard again and propped up on a seat of dead bodies by the engineer Corréard, who plunged over the side to her aid with a rope round his waist. In the meantime, the nihilistic urge to bring death to everyone aboard saw the slaughter spread all over the packed craft. Just a single example of how these men fought reveals a great deal of the group mindset. An unlucky officer, having been flung in the sea and then rescued by friends, was, while he tried to recover his breath,  grabbed once more by his attackers who set about trying to slice his eyes out of their sockets with a pocket knife. The pent up misery of a cursed voyage was bursting out of some of the most hard-bitten men of the period. It was an explosion of cruelty.

The famished combatants couldn’t maintain the intense effort of murdering each other indefinitely. There were lulls. Nonetheless, the killing continued in spurts through the night. When the seas calmed and the sun rose, only sixty had survived. Seventy others lay lifeless in wretched limp heaps or had vanished beneath the waves. The raft looked like a charnel house. As it rose and fell on the swell, bodies could be seen caught between the spars where they had fallen and become entangled. Amongst the survivors, many had severe injuries. If we are to believe Messrs Savigny and Corréard, all of this was instigated by a group of soldiers who wanted to drown themselves and everyone else. In spite of the curious inconsistencies in their account, there’s likely to be a good deal of truth to this. Terrible things come out of people in terrible situations. More so when those people have spent years in theatres of mass mutilation and death. However, the officers and those others around the mast seem to have fared better than they should have against such numbers. Something’s missing from the picture. Interestingly, there’s a conflicting account from elsewhere which perhaps fills in the gaps. It states that it was Savigny who made sure the ravenous, sleepless men got the wine. Then, when they were drunk once more and tempers were fraying, he deliberately provoked the first of the bloodshed. It was also claimed that the Medusa’s chief workman, Lavillette, followed in the wake of the fighting and ran his sword through the guts of every man he could find, injured or otherwise, who lay in the ever present water unable to rise to his feet. From behind the hidden agendas, only one certainty emerges: a great cull had taken place aboard The Machine. If it was intended to thin out the numbers and take some pressure of the finite supply of water and wine, it had failed. During the carnage, all but two barrels of the latter went over the side.

Those who survived were shattered. Most passed the day in a state of horrified exhaustion. Some wept. When able to muster the energy, rival factions eyed each other cagily across the raft. At some point a small ration of the remaining wine was handed out. Food was uppermost on everyone’s mind. An unlikely indicator of how bad things were can be found in the appearance of some large sharks alongside the boat. Far from frightening the survivors, these new arrivals provoked a bout of proactive optimism. They fashioned a bayonet into a hook, and did all they could to stab it into a nearby shark and drag it aboard. But the bayonet was straightened by a mighty bite from the creature and it went free. The harpooning effort was abandoned. Gloom descended once more. The hunger became unbearable. With all those fresh bodies heaped on The Machine, it was inevitable that someone was going to do it. The soldiers roused themselves and began to hack chunks off the dead and shovel them into their mouths. Others were repulsed by the act. These people, made up for the most part of the men beneath the mast, tried instead their hats, belts, linen shirts, and anything else they could lay their hands on. One sailor attempted to eat excrement. He failed. But the fact that a man could be reduced to such a pitiful state speaks volumes. This abstemious group held out till the following morning when the sight of a dozen or so people who had died from their wounds overnight forced them to reconsider the wisdom of starving. A long and hideous day passed as bodies were dismembered and men dined on men. Then night fell.

With energy levels a little recovered, the bloodcurdling fighting that had started forty eight hours earlier kicked off once more in the darkness. Again we hear of the workman Lavillette, who had previously finished off so many of the injured. Corréard and Savigny credit him with saving their lives and doing the most damage to the faction opposed to them. It seems this was a man capable of killing with great skill and without any hesitation. We ought to note that many of those he cut down on the second night of fighting would have been professional soldiers who knew how to handle themselves. It may seem extraordinary that a maintenance man on a ship could manage such things, but there is more to Lavillette than most commentators have noticed. We’ll have a proper look at him towards the end of the thread where he is key to understanding a major part of Gericault’s painting. For the moment, we’ll just note that an exceptionally serious killer had been set loose on the raft. With the break of dawn, he emerged triumphant – and no doubt blood soaked - from the carnage. Thanks in large part to his efforts, a further thirty men had been slain. Of all of those who remained, a mere twenty were able to stand upright from the wash which rolled over the makeshift vessel. Another ten lay spluttering in agony.

In the midst of the butchery and depravity, there was one small ray of light that most on the raft could agree on: an angelic faced twelve year old boy from The Medusa’s crew called Leon. Even the most grizzled soldiers had a soft spot for him. At the start of The Machine’s journey, he’d been taken under the wing of an injured officer and kept alive. Somehow, he had survived the savage violence, storms and privations. But he was not well. He walked to and fro across the bodies of the wounded and dead calling pathetically for his mother. This was a child in the throes of acute trauma. It was a tragic sight, and it tugged at the heartstrings of some of the survivors. Now, perhaps due to dehydration, and in spite of the best efforts of those around him, Leon’s life ebbed away. The only spark of goodness aboard the raft winked out. Reading between the lines in the account of Savigny and Corréard, it is clear this was a watershed. The men beneath the mast who had worked to retain some moral standards while others lost theirs, abandoned themselves to cruelty. Earlier that day they had summarily thrown overboard two sailors who tried to siphon off some of the remaining wine for themselves. Now, with Leon dead, the gloves came off properly. It was decided that in order to conserve the little they had, it would be best to get rid of all those who were wounded or weak. This shocking predation upon the helpless was carried out immediately. A couple of men volunteered to do the work, and twelve unfortunates were cast to their deaths. Among them was the woman who had been saved from the ocean during the annihilation of the second night. She had since been caught between some of the spars that made up the raft and broken her leg. This was enough to condemn her. The same individuals who had saved her life now took it.

At this point, only fifteen remained. A disproportionate number of them had been beneath the mast since it went up. We have to wonder just what accounted for their survival when almost all others died. Lavillette was clearly a killing machine, but he couldn’t have done for so many on his own. Exactly how organised were these people? The account they left us skitters unconvincingly around these questions. Now however, with everyone else gone, they set about stockpiling their food and wine. To render the meat more palatable, strips and flaps of flesh had previously been hung from the rigging to cure in the salt air. With more space, the fifteen souls remaining settled themselves beneath this hellish, aerial pantry and hunkered down for the long haul. On the ninth day, a pale butterfly fluttered over them and provoked an argument between those who wanted to eat it and those who thought it a precious omen of land that ought to be treasured. The row tailed off. Soon afterwards the men were drinking each others’ piss in a state of rambling delirium, and comparing notes on whose tasted best. Then, once again, a number of large sharks took an interest in the vessel. Unsurprisingly, it was Lavillette who took up a sabre and attacked one of them energetically from the raft’s edge in the hope of dragging it aboard. But he had no luck. By now a merciless sun had blistered and burnt everyone. Some, who no longer cared if they died, cooled themselves in the sea in front of the sharks. But it wasn’t the circling predators that posed the greatest threat. It was a group of Portuguese Men of War. The bathers got snarled up in their tentacles and savagely stung. It seemed at every turn, a new ordeal materialised. Brutalised, hallucinating, suicidal and in a torment of hunger, thirst and pain, they went on drifting for a few more days sustaining themselves on morsels of the dead, piss and an occasional tin cup of wine. Then, many miles away, they spotted a pair of masts peaking over the horizon.

How it must have seemed to them when they caught sight of the distant ship, we probably can’t imagine. This is, of course, the moment Gericault chose to represent in his epic painting. For half an hour the men frantically tried to attract attention. But it achieved nothing. The pinprick on the horizon disappeared from view. They were alone again. Whatever reservations we might have about the account written by Savigny and Corréard – and we must have some - when they describe the feelings of desolation that gripped the survivors at this moment, there can be no doubting them. The grief-stricken men collapsed underneath a makeshift awning they fashioned. They gave themselves up to death and wondered aloud if they should carve an account of their sufferings on a board and pin it with their names on the mast so that when the raft was found, some record of them would survive. For hours they lay inconsolable, until one looked out from under the shelter and started shouting. The distant ship had returned and was bearing down on them. It was the brig The Argus, one of the four ships that originally set out from France. After thirteen days adrift, they were saved. On that tiny cramped platform that bobbed aimlessly for a fortnight atop the ocean, one hundred and thirty two people had been murdered outright, or lost to wounds and waves. We will never know how many were eaten. Of the fifteen rescued and taken aboard The Argus, another five were beyond help and died shortly afterwards. The voyage for new beginnings that started a month before in the sunshine in France had descended into a pit of hell which offered only obliteration or survival on the most diabolical terms imaginable. Those who lived had paid a price.

When news of these appalling events reached France, monarchists in powerful positions tried to hush-up the scandal. Explaining the appointment of the inadequate captain Chaumereys after such a calamity would not be straightforward for the new regime. It would give ammunition to the wrong sorts and expose a system of patronage that was happy to risk the lives of hundreds provided the idiot that led them had the right politics. Yet bit by bit news of the shipwreck and loss of life was leaked to the public by elements hostile to the new establishment. It says something that the details electrified a nation that had been immersed in guillotines, bloodbaths and wars for most of the twenty five years since the revolution. But then, cannibalism has always grabbed the headlines. There could be no covering up of it either. Reports were widespread of how the survivors were found beneath a fluttering clothesline of human flesh, with more of it spilling out of their pockets. In the account released by Savigny and Corréard, the men were candid about the fact, and implored the public for its understanding. They were not the only ones who had to do some pleading. Before long, Captain Chaumereys, who with most of the occupants of the lifeboats had made it to Senegal, was returned and court-martialed. He received what was, by the standards of the time, a slap on the wrist. Rather than face execution, he was stripped of his office and pensions and given three years in prison. The navy was keen to sweep as much as possible into a quiet corner where no one would bother to look. One essential lesson was learned though. A new law was passed to ensure in the future that positions such as the former captain’s would never again be awarded on the flimsy grounds of favouritism or to engineer an organisation more to the political tastes of those in charge. From now on, the only consideration in these appointments was to be merit, and merit alone. In the meantime, the most vocal survivors of the raft, Savigny and Corréard, faced no repercussions for their actions. Even so, they were shunned by the establishment and struggled to get back on their feet.

Around this time the young Gericault became fascinated by the scandal. He had developed an interest in painting a macabre scene of murder or execution. This morbid appetite for the gruesome was perhaps not so unusual; many young men have it. And Gericault was in a dire personal situation which probably didn’t incline him towards pretty picture making (a love affair with his very much married aunt had led to a pregnancy). But he needed something that would do more than send shivers down spines. He also wanted a theme that had weight and relevance to France herself. The ill fated raft of The Medusa, with its stark political backdrop, was a gift. Gericault was thorough. He devoured every scrap of information he could find on the disaster. In his studio, a dossier was filled to bursting with newspaper clippings beside the published accounts that he bought. He obtained heads, arms, legs and other off cuts of cadavers from a hospital for his research and painted them like joints of meat in a butcher’s display. Before long he had co-opted the help of those survivors of the raft who were in Paris. Corréard and, for a while, Savigny became the painter’s frequent companions. So too The Medusa’s deadly chief workman Lavillette, who built a scale model of the raft for the artist. Gericault talked to these men over and over again so as to have the closest possible understanding of what happened to them. Then, realising the vast scale of the project he was about to commence, he took on a studio on the outskirts of Paris, one that was large enough to accommodate the enormous canvas he was embarking on. Moving out of town had another advantage. Like many painters undertaking a formidable project, Gericault was keen to leave behind the world of distractions. In a gesture that had monastic echoes, he shaved his head. He also set up a bed just off the studio and arranged for food to be brought to him. Visitors were not encouraged. With a few exceptions, those who could help the painting along or model for its figures were the only people to pass through the studio doors. The immersion was complete. The serious work began.

The canvas was vast. Twenty three feet by sixteen. How do you start such a behemoth? The first thing Gericault had to figure out was which scene he was going to paint aboard the raft. As has been pointed out by writers like Julian Barnes, this was not straightforward. There were so many to choose from: the initial embarkation into the waist high water, the rowing boats leaving behind the raft, the tossing storms, the fighting, the encounters with sharks, the cannibalism, the moment of rescue. Gericault experimented with a few of these ideas in sketches and studies. The difficulties of depicting the earlier moments on The Machine would have been instantly obvious to him. Painting a hundred and fifty figures would be tricky enough, but to have them all submerged to their belts in a roiling ocean would look weird. Even if he managed it well, the sheer strangeness of the image would detract from any merits the finished piece might have. There were alternative approaches though. It’s clear from his collection of severed limbs that a scene of cannibalism was a prominent contender. But this was unlikely to go down too well at the annual Salon competition where he hoped in due course to exhibit the painting. Too full on. Besides, by now Gericault had become a good friend of Corréard. Shock-jocking the Salon audience with gobbets of flesh hanging from ropes would inevitably mean awkward questions for his new friend, and scrutiny of the engineer’s ambivalent role in what happened on The Machine. In the end, Gericault settled upon the moment where the men, now on a lighter more raised raft, sighted the distant ship only to be abandoned again. It is, if we think about it, the moment of the most intense psychological force. It is the point where every tiny sliver of hope the living still possessed was crushed out. He chose well.

As he began, Gericault broke with many of the rules painters take for granted. The observations that follow over the next few paragraphs might interest artists more than others. But they’re worth sticking with if you’ve ever wondered what processes lie, or don’t lie, behind those great big antique pictures you’ve seen in galleries. Firstly, he did not cover his canvas with the sort of coloured ‘ground’ that is preferred by most figurative painters when they start something big. This is a thin uniform coat of red or grey over the entire surface. It offers a helpful midtone, neither dark nor light, on which colours which are brighter or dimmer can be painted so as to lay out the bones of the composition. It can be a great aid in developing things quickly and vividly. But Gericault felt no need of it. Instead, he started the picture of the raft directly onto the white of his canvas. Often, you can get away with this on smaller paintings. But on a larger one, beware. It makes things very tough. Lights and darks – the building blocks of any realist picture - become hard to judge because the underlying pale surface on which they will be placed tends massively towards one end of the light spectrum rather than sitting at a more balanced point somewhere in the middle. The bigger a painting gets, the more important this balancing act becomes. Strange as it may seem to us, Gericault was not the only Parisian to operate this way. Jacques Louis David was inclined to do the same. Perhaps, then, we should see this surprising rejection of a norm as a fashion of the time and place. Or perhaps it’s just a coincidence. In any event, it wasn’t our man’s only departure from the usual painting routines.

After brushing on a uniform ground, the next thing most painters do when tackling a piece like this on canvas is put down a thin layer of paint that roughly corresponds to the desired picture. This is called an underpainting. It’s a light coating of semi transparent washes that can be easily revised. It’s not always necessary. But with a big and complicated realist piece, it’s an excellent way for an artist to check that the position, structure and tone of everything is on point; that the scheme which has been hashed out in smaller drawings is going to scale up successfully. Problems can be spotted and solved before they become serious. If big adjustments are needed, they don’t take long. Fresh ideas can be played with in a way that’s not possible when things are more developed. Once all the parts look like they’re corresponding well with each other, the serious work gets underway. A second much meatier film of paint goes on. This is the layer that will do the heavy optical lifting and really form the picture into something solid for the eyes. Over the centuries, this use of an initial washy picture as a template for a thicker one on top has been considered indispensable by almost everyone who’s taken on large arrangements. I say almost everyone because, of course, Gericault had other ideas. He was no more bothered by this convention than he was by the last. Instead of working up an underpainting, he attacked the heavy stuff immediately. We are told he would concentrate on one small area of the giant white canvas at a time, and stick with it until it was finished. Then and only then, he’d move to the next blank white area. All he had to guide him were some sparingly drawn outlines. It was as if he was manufacturing and clicking together the pieces of an enormous jigsaw puzzle one at a time. Item by item, figure by figure, he built the piece just so.

To me, it is reasonably clear that Gericault was borrowing some of the working methods fresco painters use on walls and ceilings. His process of finishing one small part at a time is almost identical to a fresco where, each day, the artist draws, colours and completes only on as much carefully laid wet plaster as he can handle before it dries. There is no underpainting as it would be pointless. It would be covered by the plaster which, day by day, is added to the wall to receive the colours. With little more than a roughly chalked outline to guide where the plaster is laid, the artist progresses across the wall or ceiling morsel by morsel, building the overall picture like a mosaic. Over the course of weeks and months, dozens, maybe hundreds, of sections slowly meld together into one unified whole. The only way to make a success of this approach is to be able to refer to a comprehensively thought-through, large, detailed drawing where the layout of the painting has been fully decided in advance. Eyeballing things and running on instinct is not an option. It seems likely to me therefore that Gericault worked from such a drawing. He would have resolved most of his design difficulties long before he touched a brush.

When he was ready, just like a fresco painter, he pencilled in a grid over his drawing and then an identical second grid scaled up to fit the towering canvas. Confident that his homework was done and that there wasn’t a single spot where he didn’t know exactly what should happen, he could ditch the idea of an underpainting and go for it square by square, translating what was on the drawing to the canvas. His corresponding grids would ensure that he located everything correctly. With every component in its place, he could then get live models to pose so that he could finesse his figures whenever it was needed. Why did Gericault take this route rather than use the more organic tactics that usually come with canvas painting? I think the answer is straightforward. The Raft of The Medusa was far, far bigger than anything he’d done before. For someone who had no experience of this kind of endeavour it must have been quite scary. There was so much that could go wrong on the sprawling surface. Realising this, he borrowed methods that were tried and trusted in the one field of painting where epic scales are the norm. Gericault was a man with a plan. This is a first-class reminder that the cliché about the best art being spontaneous is nonsense. It also helps to explain another curious thing we hear about Gericault’s process. This one involves his brushes.

Every artist knows that when they’re at work on an outsized painting, it’s best to use big brushes at the start of a project while the broad movements are laid out. Smaller ones are picked up only as the image tightens up and the details are rendered. Gericault, we are told, went about things differently. From start to finish he painted with small brushes. Over time, this eye-catching nugget has been attached to The Raft of The Medusa as a badge of its artistic mystique. The claim comes from Antoine Montfort who is our source for much of the information on Gericault’s methods. Antoine was a frequent visitor to his friend’s studio, and a fine painter in his own right. He knew his onions. When he tells us Gericault painted on a white canvas without an underpainting and so on, I have no trouble believing him. These are irreversible one off decisions that would have been obvious to an informed bystander at any point during the first few months of the painting’s development. It’s another thing, however, to state that everything was done with a certain type of brush. For starters, Montfort simply wasn’t present for the 1500/2000 hours of daylight available to Gericault in the eight months he painted The Raft of The Medusa. At best, he was around for a tiny fraction of it. It’s also obvious from the handling of the background waves and sky that broad brushes must have been involved. These elements are too unified to have been built in bite-sized strokes. It’s probably the case that Montfort’s observations occurred when the busy areas in the centre of the picture were on the go. In these zones, with a fresco-ish system of bit by bit painting underway, the artist certainly would have been using more precise tools. But this is what we would expect. So when we are asked to believe there was something unusual about Gericault’s brushwork, we can raise a sceptical brow and remind ourselves that this was likely to be the case in only some areas, and wasn’t at all likely in others.

In spite of navigating so many pitfalls successfully, Gericault did make one colossal error. With the passage of time, many materials once favoured by artists have turned out to be shoddy. There are pigments which fade or change over the decades. There are liquid vehicles for artists’ colours (oily mediums) and varnishes that are prone to crack badly or turn yellow. Very few of these rogue elements, however, can rival the sheer destructive power of a particular pigment that Gericault was fond of. We know it as bitumen. It offered the sort of warm brown black that was perfect for those shadowy parts of a painting where things can only be barely seen. When used in large measures, however, it was a slow acting virus. To the touch, it might feel dry. But underneath, it would stew corrosively for decades. Eventually the surface above would wrinkle. Ridges of crumpled, cracking paint would rise proud. Surrounding colours would be leeched as if a vampire had sucked the life out of them. Whole sections of a painting could turn into a featureless soup,  pockmarked with craters. It took years, of course. Otherwise artists would have seen what the pigment did and treated the stuff as if it was radioactive. Even so, many had a hunch that it wasn’t smart to mess around with it too much. But Gericault wasn’t among them. Towards the end of the painting, he brushed on thick, transparent varnishes of bitumen over the shadowy areas of the composition. He laid it on like he owed it a favour. He thought of his blacks as a colour that ‘suited pain’. And there was plenty of that to be placed upon the raft. In the years that followed, however, this poison started gnawing away at the picture. The damage was spectacular. These days, there are areas which are almost completely unreadable. Many important details have been obliterated forever.

In spite of the injury done to the picture, it is straightforward to dissect its overall design. The outer areas of the canvas are painted in fairly uniform midtones. In and around the centre, the painting springs to life with some complicated passages of highly contrasted lights and darks. Painters have known for centuries that high contrast tends to make things vivid and lifelike – there’s a reason why modern TV makers are forever attempting to get darker and richer blacks into their displays. It is also used to grab our attention; the human eye picks up on it faster than anything else. Think of motorway signs or many poisonous animals. Gericault does a textbook job of setting up his darks and lights in the zones where the action unfolds. They are broadly arranged on a sloping thrust running from the near left to the back right. Two hundred years before, this diagonal surge had been a common visual tactic in Baroque paintings. It can give a picture drama and movement in a way that more symmetrical compositions don’t. Gericault grabbed the idea and put it to work, so as to take our eyes on a short journey from the despair at the front of the piece to the tiny ship of hope at the back. Squint your eyes so that everything blurs and you’ll see how well it provided the picture with energy and interest. Branching off this central slant, there are some secondary patches of light. They balance the piece and give it less of a contrived look.

Over the years, encouraged by the rigging and the taller group of people on the right, many commentators have seen the layout as a pair of pyramids set one adjacent to the other. Art experts have a stubborn tendency to see such pyramids in designs that are visually heavier at the bottom than the top. To be honest, it’s a claim that often strikes me as a bit superfluous, a bit so what. You can see triangular forms in any arrangement with a broad base; every shoulder length portrait ever done, for example. They’re usually an incidental by-product, not a priority. For Gericault, they certainly weren’t the major design objective some would have you believe. Here, he was much more interested in supplementing his big Baroque diagonal with tall vertical arrangements placed a third and two thirds across the surface. They give the picture a pleasing, solid rhythm as well as helping with the upward shove. The triangles they hint at are secondary.

Finally, we come to the two pale bodies left and right. They are angled down towards their respective corners. This helps to anchor the whole design. It also opens the picture for us and channels our eyes towards the centre. It’s an unusual and very clever device, one which occurred to Gericault only at the end of the project. Until then, the half submerged figure on the right hadn’t existed. Some have suggested that this person is female. This is not the case. The model was Gericault’s very much male assistant, Jamar. He was placed in a pose that the painter had played with before in drawings but then rejected, and was brushed in at speed. There is a second myth that this was done in a single day at the Salon, with Gericault under pressure to complete before the show was hung. Sadly, it’s not true. A figure as polished as this needs much more than a day. Even when a genius is at work.

The raft sails from right to left across the picture. The curiously shaped tailboards that occur at the rear in Corréard’s drawn plan of The Machine can be seen here on the right. The sail is full, and the wind whips the loose rigging rope before it. The weather is not going to bring the craft any closer to the ship that is just about visible in the distance. Instead, it is on course for ominous churning waves. The horizon line is set quite high in the picture. This makes us feel that we, like the men, are utterly walled in by the ocean, something that wouldn’t be the case if the horizon was lower. Our noses are rubbed in their confinement and misery. Yet there is hope. Out there beyond the stormy clouds, lighter skies can be seen in the distance. They are tantalisingly close. The men aboard The Machine are a grim mixture of the dead, the damned, the desperate and the hopeful. Broadly, they are arranged in that order from the front of the picture to the back. Much is made of their muscular forms. Surely they should look more like the emaciated creatures they actually were. But Gericault wasn’t  trying to be a journalist. He wanted to create a feel. He was a disciple of Michelangelo’s commanding style. There was a word for the sense of awe and power that came off the heavy rhythmic forms the Italian painted and sculpted: ‘terribilità’.  Gericault was trying to create a painting with this quality baked in. He knew that rolling solid musculatures would do a better job of conveying an overwhelming and epic scene than a series of sharp, straight, skeletal figures. Even so, he pared back the raw, bulging strength that he worked into the men in his earlier studies, and so struck a careful balance between truth and expression.

Of the six people at the front of the picture, only three are alive. The others are painted with the sort of pale greeny greys that Gericault first mastered on the severed body parts he brought to his studio. A fourth individual with dark hair and an outstretched arm is flopped face down on the timbers. It seems he’ll soon be joining the dead. This figure was modelled by a young Delacroix, then only two years into his training as a painter. (Later on, Delacroix would recall that the appearance of the unfinished painting gave him such heebie jeebies that after he left the studio he sprinted as quickly as he could to get away.) In the middle of this arrangement, we can see an older man cradling what is thought to be the body of his son. His forearm is bandaged as if he’s fended off a blow. Perhaps he’s been injured while protecting his son’s body from being taken for food. We know such an idea was in Gericault’s mind because an early plan for the painting depicted the young man without the lower half of a leg.

What is most striking about the father is that while others are stirred up by the distant ship, he is beyond caring. He sits slumped with his head in hand, staring vacantly into the distance. He’s gone to a place no salvation can reach. Beside him a shadowy figure with a classical profile cradles the body of Delacroix. Perhaps he’s been trying to encourage him. Now, however, he turns to see what the commotion is about. He’s a sort of narrative link that draws us into the next phase of the painting higher up the canvas. (At least, he would be if the bitumen hadn’t turned him so dark.)The arrangement of these six men is surprisingly symmetrical. The father and shadowy man curve away from each other; their own limbs and those of the people they hold spread out at roughly equivalent angles; a dead body adds ballast and bookends either side. If they were isolated from the rest of the picture, they’d look a bit too organised. But they’re not, and so it works. All of the blokes in this bottom zone are huge, considerably bigger than life size. They’re overwhelming when you stand in front of them. To see these dead men up close and painted so large, it’s hard not to feel you’re both part of the picture and in the presence of something unusually powerful.

The middle of the raft is a domain of despair and helplessness. There are seven people arrayed across this part of the painting. In the shadows under the mast, one man stares out to the left. He is very difficult to pick out as once again we find the bitumen has done its worst. Nonetheless, we can just about tell that he echoes the set up of the father further down. He has his back to everyone and is oblivious to the activity around him. He’s been pushed beyond breaking point. Just beside him and looking inwards is the most anguished figure aboard. He sits with his head in both hands, fingers bunched in his hair, like a madman trying to claw the demons out of his skull. In the middle, a trio of figures make up the most significant part of the diagonal push through the painting. They are on their knees or are just rising up. They haven’t the strength to stand and wave to the distant dot on the horizon. But they try to help those who can. On the right, we see another man in a twisted pose attempting to help the signallers. It appears that moments before he was cradling an unconscious black companion who now lolls awkwardly over his thigh. Beneath this pair there is an axe. It is bloodied. We’ll return to this item in a while.

At the back of the picture, everyone is more spirited. There are seven figures. These are proactive and firmly focussed on signalling the ship. It is here that Gericault placed the key men whose names have cropped up a few times in our story, and who each came to know the painter in his studio in Paris. Beside the mast we can see Savigny, Corréard, the lethal Lavillette, and a black gent. If we peer closely we can see that Corréard has grasped a glum looking Savigny by the arm to draw his attention. Savigny, leaning against the mast, looks on. He seems immobile and unconvinced. Behind them, Lavillette and the other fellow clasp each others’ hands in a gesture of shared desperate hope. To the right, two men signal the distant ship with strips of red and white cloth. A third figure supports the highest man aboard the raft, an African crewman called Jean Charles. Again we see hands connecting. Jean Charles’ right hand has a firm grip on that of the man who holds him up on the precarious barrel. A similar sort of connection is made on the right where the signaller who leans on his side is supported by the outstretched hand of the man behind him. In fact, all across the raft, we see men in physical contact with each other, supporting, holding, comforting. A case could be made that the hands which feature across the painting do more talking than the faces. There is something uplifting about the emphasis Gericault placed on how these lost souls were in it together and doing their best for each other. It injects a small dose of good into the wretchedness. And yet, given what we know, it is hard to believe it was true. This was not the only editorialising Gericault carried out.

As we’ve gone through the figures aboard, you might have noticed that there are twenty of them on the raft, not the fifteen we know were there in real life. We can tell from earlier studies Gericault dashed out that he began with the intention of sticking closely to the actual events. But as time went by, other ideas occurred to him. One of these developments was thematic in nature. It was born out of Gericault’s friendship with Corréard. The engineer was politically energetic with muscular liberal convictions. He was implacably opposed to slavery. Across the channel in Britain, slavery had attracted increasingly staunch opposition for forty years. A decade previously, an act of parliament was passed making the trading of slaves illegal across the British Empire. Although France was moving in a similar direction, it wasn’t happening fast enough for Corréard. Gericault’s political sympathies were not far behind his new friend’s. He listened with an open ear. Doubtless this was an issue they discussed a lot. It should come as no surprise then that the painter decided to place some remarks on the matter in his painting. In his sketches we see Gericault start to elevate Jean Charles, the only survivor of African origins, to a more prominent position in the picture. In the final painting, he is very much the apex of everything. All eyes eventually travel to him.

Jean Charles is held aloft in a gesture close to a hug with a knee braced for support on the figure in front of him. There’s intimacy here. It is also implied that his efforts have the best chance of attracting the attention of the ship and saving everyone. Establishing a black man as the most heroic figure in an epic painting was going to go unnoticed by precisely no one in early 1800s France. But Gericault wanted to underscore the point emphatically. He installed two invented African men who were not on the raft when it was found. We mentioned them both earlier: one lying face down, the other standing behind Lavillette. In each case, Gericault painted them in such a way as to imply emotional bonds between these fictional characters and those around them. The figure lying down is in a bad way, but he appears to have been cared for by the man twisting to help the signallers. He is no chattel to be sold or discarded. Most brotherly of all is the connection between the African in the group under the mast and Lavillette. Lavillette’s hands are pressed together in prayer, while his wrists are clasped earnestly by his African companion. Together they stare with grim focus at the efforts of Jean Charles. The two men are joined together in their shared hope and their appeal to greater powers. Nothing divides them. In spite of the obscuring bitumen, it’s the most eloquent and humane gesture in the picture.

After the general horror of what befell those aboard The Machine, it is natural for many moderns to see Gericault’s elaborations with the three black men as the next most compelling part of the painting - this is a picture that has been built well enough to reach well beyond its own time. But there is a story that had far more heft for Gericault’s generation which takes place elsewhere in the painting. It is played out almost entirely through the dead man lying face up at the bottom left of the picture. He attracts next to no attention from those who write the art history books. If he’s mentioned at all, it’s usually to classify him as a bit of visual ballast added late in the painting to an area that otherwise would have looked too empty. There’s truth to this. But the dead body also ought to be examined in its own right. Gericault left lots of hints that there is more going on here than a rebalancing of the picture. And there is. To get a handle on it, we have to look closely. When we do, the first thing that stands out is that Gericault painted a great deal of stuff around this character. No one else aboard the raft comes with so many bits and pieces attached. If you’ve read previous threads of mine, you’ll know that when we see a lot of specific and detailed effort going into a small secondary area, it’s time to sit up and pay attention. Good artists never do this without reason. So what’s going on here? We’ll start with the kit surrounding the man.

It’s difficult to identify everything through the distortions of the bitumen. But with a bit of patient effort we can discern an upturned shako (soldier’s helmet), a military haversack with its straps undone and trailing in the water, and finally on the extreme left a giberne (a stiff leather pouch filled with the powder charge, ball, flint and so on for a musket). Gericault wants us to be in no doubt that we’re looking at a soldier. And not a generic soldier either. Each item that was painted here contains a tiny but very deliberate signifier that allows us to figure out where in the army the man might have belonged. On the rim of his shako there is a dark pompon. Before the bitumen did it’s work, it was probably red. (The other colours typical of shako pompons – green, pale blue, yellow – would announce themselves more vividly through the bitumen.) This red decoration narrows down the possibilities. The pale straps on the haversack also limit the field. Most specific of all is the emblem on the dead man’s giberne. It’s comprised of two straight objects shallowly crossed. (This motif is a little clearer in copies and prints of the picture made in the 1800s.) A solitary French military insignia from the time matches this format: a crossed pair of cannon barrels. Only one body within the army had these crossed barrels on their cartouche boxes and red pompons on their shakos. This man was in a brigade of the Artillery. This is the outfit which gave a start to, and then propelled to everlasting fame a young obscure lieutenant from Corsica named Napoleon. The crossed barrels were associated with the man in a way other regimental insignia simply were not. In the popular imagination, they were as wedded to Bonaparte as the longbow was to Robin Hood. Gericault spent too much time around soldiers to be unaware of the symbolic link. This is intentional on his part. So what’s he up to? Perhaps I should start by explaining why this emblem should not be on the raft in the first place.

As I mentioned early in the thread, the year before The Medusa sailed, Louis XVIII, restructured the French army. He weeded out Bonapartist officers and broke every tradition that might link the military to its Napoleonic past. Regiments, especially the most famous ones, were dissolved and their soldiers distributed across new regional legions. Uniforms were changed from blue to white. The famous gold eagles that had been carried as proud standards into battle were put aside. Veterans, horrified at what was being done to their culture and heritage, burnt their regimental flags and colours, mixed the ashes with wine, and drank them before they fell into the hands of the new regime. Amongst these unpopular changes, there was one of a more trivial nature: the old metal insignia on cartridge boxes and elsewhere were changed to oval royal crests or the pre-revolution fleur de lis. Every soldier in 1816 involved in official business such as receiving on the Bourbon king’s behalf  a colony from England would have been allowed Bourbon insignia only. Those crossed cannons we can just about see on the giberne (although they were a widespread artillery symbol across the world’s armies) were too loaded with the past, too redolent of Napoleon to be permitted in a new France. Even if there was an equipment shortage, it is unlikely they would have been tolerated on an official overseas mission headed up by royalists. Painting three years after these reforms had begun, Gericault knew full well that the soldiers who had been abandoned on the raft were not kitted out as they had been under Bonaparte. He was bending the truth to make a point.

We know by the time he painted these later figures, Gericault was thinking of issues that went far beyond events on The Machine. He had already set out his stall in respect of slavery. Here he turned his attention to the numberless dispossessed soldiers washed up in alleyways and taverns all around France. After Louis XVIII displaced Bonaparte, these men were humiliated. A shameful witch-hunt saw the political views of 25,000 officers graded on a fourteen point scale. As is the case with any political purity test, context and common sense were immediately jettisoned. Resentment and loathing took their place. A staggering 20,000 ranked men were expelled from the army they had served. They could not wear their uniforms in public, nor bear arms, nor display their medals. To prevent them from gathering together, they were compelled by law to return to the localities where they were born. They could not travel without permission. Nor could they marry without same. Like criminals on probation, they had to check in fortnightly with local authorities. Any letters they sent were read and vetted by what amounted to snitches and censors. Their pensions – never that generous to begin with - were also cut in half. Things were a little less claustrophobic for the common or garden soldier. But 100,000 of them were also on half pay, and all were bereft at the loss of their regiments, uniforms, colours and connections with a spectacular past. Napoleon’s sons of victory were stripped of every shred of dignity and stuffed into the attic of French society. Worst of all, these were not measures cooked up by some vengeful all-conquering Austrian or Englishman; they were courtesy of other Frenchmen. This sorry mess was one of the great upheavals of Gericault’s lifetime. It amounted to a complete rearrangement of public culture. For many people, it was a disgrace and a blot on the nation’s copybook.

Before we have a final look at the dead artillery soldier and unearth the message he has for us, we need to be aware of an Agatha Christie type twist to his tale. This is where we return at last to Lavillette. In every nineteenth century and modern source that mentions the man, he is referred to as either The Medusa’s ‘chief workman’ or ‘carpenter’. Yet, as we have seen, each time there was killing to be done on the raft, or wounded people to be run through, or sharks to be attacked, Lavillette was there swinging his blade with unmatched ferocity. That’s because he was no ordinary maintenance man or chippie. Twice in their account, Savigny and Corréard let slip that he was a former sergeant of artillery within Napoleon’s elite Old Guard. The artillery uniform and gear Gericault painted around the dead soldier is exactly what Lavillette used to wear. He would have worn it with great pride too. The regiment his artillery unit was attached to was renowned across the world. The Old Guard were the immortals of Bonaparte’s reign. Famously, he once called them his children. In return they offered him utter devotion and demolished every opponent that stood before them. Whenever their terrifying columns tramped out to fight, the odds changed dramatically for everyone. For these reasons, they were at the very top of the new Bourbon regime’s black list. They simply had to be disbanded if Louis XVIII was to make a clean break with the legacy of Napoleon.

Lavillette was not just a veteran of this notorious outfit, he was a sergeant. He would have come up the hard way and earned his stripes on merit. This was a man who could calmly run a unit of combat-hardened nutters in the red hot furnace of a ripped apart battlefield. Once we realise this, we can finally grasp how he had such a knack and appetite for killing others on the raft. Whether he had left the Old Guard for a life on the sea beforehand or was booted out in the course of the new regime’s purges, we can be sure that he was enraged by the king’s destruction of his former regiment. He had been fighting with his comrades as recently as two years before in Germany. The bond was still fresh. Just as Corréard discussed slavery with the artist in his studio, Lavillette, as he fashioned a scale model of the raft for the painter, would have dwelt on how he and his brothers in arms had been betrayed. Gericault was responsive. Choosing for his subject a uniform and kit identical to what his new friend had once worn, he crafted with his brushes a final subplot for the picture.

The dead soldier aboard the raft is surrounded by the trappings of a past that ties him to Bonaparte. His uniform is the traditional blue and red of an Old Guard artillery man, not the new Bourbon white. But it has been peeled from his body, leaving him naked. The fastenings of his haversack have been half opened as if his possessions have been rifled and thieved. From one of the straps, an epaulette – a shoulder decoration that denotes his rank; perhaps a sergeant – dangles pathetically in the seawater; a proud badge about to be washed away. We see also that this unfortunate man has been murdered. Gericault made a very precise choice of wound. The soldier has been struck through the sternum into the heart. He’s been pierced in the organ which houses his trust, his commitment, his love, and his pride. A cruel blow for a faithful man. The colours that make up that bloodstain on his chest are repeated further down on his torso. If we look hard, we can see that his body is dismembered. It’s tastefully handled without any gore, but his lower half is gone. The axe we noted earlier has been used for the job. It can be seen on the other side of the picture. It’s a crude heavy thing with a broken handle and bloodstains on its face. To the right of the axe, trailing in the water we can see the blue red and white of some crumpled cloth or a uniform. These colours were also those of the French Tricolore which was established properly under Napoleon as the national flag. By now, however, this too had been replaced with the white of the Bourbons. The Tricolore was shelved in the hope it would be forgotten.

Once we spot how the soldier’s body has been pulled asunder – and not everyone does - it would seem he’s a reference to the cannibalism that took place on The Machine. But, as I’ve tried to explain, he also points to a past that’s been trampled on by a heavy-handed and conceited present. He’s a cipher for the chopping up of a proud army and the destruction of a layer of the national culture. He is an epitome of soldiers betrayed at home as well as on the ocean. The plight of Lavillette and all those other humiliated men was always going to attract Gericault’s sympathy. He seems to have been artistically drawn to military men. Three substantial  paintings he’d managed previously centred on soldiers. He depicted them as vigorous, dignified blokes contending with forces much greater than themselves. The anonymous artillery man who has been stripped, stolen from, killed and cut in half is a sad epilogue to that cycle. So much work was put into this element within the picture that it is clear to me this was an issue that meant a great deal to Gericault . I can’t help wondering how much of Lavillette’s personal rage and indignation passed into the young painter in the course of their conversations. A lot, I would guess. And yet, he had to be mindful. It would be counterproductive to overdo things in a painting intended for the Salon competition. The king who was ultimately responsible for the army’s change of fortune was going to attend. Poking him too directly in the eye wouldn’t be wise.

When Louis XVIII did see the piece, it was at a preview of the annual Paris Salon exhibition in 1819. He stopped for some time in front of the painting and carefully took it in. Even if some of Gericault’s symbolism was too cryptic to be unpicked immediately, the king knew perfectly well this was not a picture which was singing his praises. But he was magnanimous. He quipped to Gericault that this painting of a catastrophe was far from catastrophic for the painter. Sadly, this ungrudging praise wasn’t enough to sway the judging panel. Gericault won only a minor prize for the piece. It was not bought for the national collection in the Louvre, as he might have expected had the work been less controversial. Whatever about the prestige, he could have done with the money. From start to finish, he had funded the entire project from his own pocket. This is unheard of with paintings of this size. A patron is usually a must if the overheads that come with such work are going to be managed. Rejected, Gericault took the giant canvas of its stretchers, rolled it up and dropped it at a friend’s house. The past year of effort and its culmination in this personal setback took a severe toll. The painter left for the countryside where he battled black moods and tried to get himself back on track. Fortune did smile briefly on him. A year later he travelled with the picture to London to exhibit to a much more receptive audience. The painting was a hit, and Gericault’s pockets were returned to health by a pay per view show. He was twenty nine years old, and at a point where his star should have risen for a decade or two at the very least. But it was not to be. Increasingly given to depression, he was overcome by deeper more frequent slumps. A couple of riding accidents knocked him about badly and paved the way for consumption, or tuberculosis as we call it now. The disease gradually ate him alive. He died, most likely in great discomfort, at the age of thirty two. The Louvre bought The Raft Of The Medusa from his estate a few months later.

This has been a long essay that asks a lot of the online reader; a chunky 14,000 words. That’s because it’s not right to squash such an intense meeting of art with life into skinny pellets of chicken feed. Do it right, or not at all. I’ve gone as deep into the meaning of the picture as I think it is possible to confidently go; certainly further than anyone else I know of. However, there is much I’ve left aside that has to do with Gericault and the survivors of the raft. There are gripping stories of human drama that took place in Paris around this painting as it was brought to life. If you’re interested, I’d suggest the excellent book, ‘Medusa: The Shipwreck, The Scandal, The Masterpiece’ by Jonathan Miles. For events aboard the raft itself, Google ‘Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816’ and click on the Gutenberg link that comes up in the results. This is the account written by Savigny and Corréard. I think it’s an untrustworthy, inconsistent, self serving attempt to whitewash the reputations of its authors. Nonetheless, there is a core of hideous truth to it that cannot be concealed. It ought to be read with a glass of something bracing close to hand. Those people sailed past the darkest frontiers of human experience. No horror movie comes close. That such a powerful and beautifully constructed work of art could emerge from such a cesspit of depravity and despair is extraordinary. This is, I think, one of the lessons the picture offers to artists alive today. If you’re serious about revealing brutal ugly truths – as some modern and urban focussed artists often are - you don’t reach for blunt or shocking artistic language. You reach for the sublime. Maybe then you’ll manage something that can speak across generations and centuries. Provided you lay off the bitumen.