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(music) ("In The Sky With Diamonds" by Scalding Lucy)
Beth: We're in the Louvre and we're looking at
Géricault's enormous painting,
the Raft of the Medusa from 1819.
Steven: This is actually about an event
that had taken place only three years earlier.
The story very quickly is that there was
a merchant vessel that was often off the
coast of Africa, it hit a storm and the
captain realized that the ship was going down.
He asked the carpenter to take some of the
lumber from the ship and to fashion a raft
because there were not enough lifeboats.
For the most part, the crew and the captain
took the actual lifeboats and
put the rest of the passengers on the raft.
They were going to tow the raft behind them,
but when the captain saw that he couldn't
make any way pulling the raft,
he actually ordered that the rope be cut.
Beth: 150 people were on the raft and
only 15 of them survived after just 10 days.
Géricault shows us the moment when
they see the ship that will save them
on the horizon; they've just glimpsed it
and they're frantically waving down this ship.
The Raft of the Medusa is the size of
a history painting and yet it is not
a history painting, it is not mythology,
it's not history, it's not a religious painting,
it is a contemporary subject.
Steven: The artist has worked for years in his studio
to replicate, and accurately as possible,
the shipwreck going so far as to actually
ask the same carpenter to rebuild
the raft in his studio; to go to the morgue,
to look drowned bodies, to study everything
he could to make it as precise as possible
and yet, this is not photographic in any way.
This is using all of the traditions of history
painting in order to create this tour de force,
this incredibly powerful, emotional image.
Beth: For all of his efforts to be accurate
in some ways, rebuilding the raft,
reading of all the newspaper reports ...
Steven: Going to the trial actually,
where the captain had been indicted.
Beth: Right, and as you said, going to the morgue,
surrounding himself at times with
decapitated heads and amputated arms and limbs
in order to keep himself in a kind of
gruesome frame of mind of death and mortality.
It still has aspects that draw on the
tradition of religious painting and history painting.
He's obviously looking at Caravaggio.
We have strong contrasts of light and dark.
The figures are more heroic and healthier
than they would have been when they were rescued.
There's this strange mixture that we often see
actually in romanticism and this is a kind of
proto-romantic painting of mixtures of
the real and the unreal.
Steve: This is a painting, first and foremost,
that is about the relationship between man and nature,
and the relationship between man and man.
Look at the spectrum of emotion that
exists in this painting.
This is a painting that's about feeling,
but it's an expression of feeling
through the physical body and so
this is an artist who's looked at Michaelangelo
quite clearly, but if you start at the
bottom left of the painting and
you look at the older man who's mourning
the now drowned body of his son,
this is terrible despair.
As you move upward towards the upper right
into this apex of hope as we see people
trying to flag down that distant ship
which seems almost impossible for
them to be seen.
There's this crescendo of optimism
as it moves from lower left to upper right.
Look at the bodies, there's so much darkness
amongst them it almost seems like those
limbs might not belong to individuals,
but they are part of some multi-limbed beast.
Beth: That rises on this receding diagonal
back into space.
Steven: That diagonal is like a wave
that counters the real wave which is on the left.
Beth: That idea of fusing bodies into
a single action is something that Géricault
would have borrowed also from Baroque art.
If you study all the sketches Géricault
created for this painting,
and he did dozens of sketches and
several oil sketches and worked on it,
as you said, for a long time,
you see that what he worked toward it
moving the raft more and more into the viewer's space.
It's not taking place in the middle ground.
It's not even taking place in the foreground,
it's taking place in our space,
foreshortened down into the viewer's space,
really making this effort to engage us
very directly and very emotionally.
Steve: That raft looks like it is literally
hitting the frame, doesn't it?
Beth: Exactly.
Steven: Those bodies, both the one whose head is
hidden from us and probably just underwater,
seems like it's literally just under
the frame of the canvas.
Beth: The other really important thing about
this painting is not just that Géricault took
this contemporary subject and painted
on the scale and in the style of a history painting,
but that he took a politically sensitive subject.
The issue was that the captain of this ship
who had abandoned these people on the raft
had been appointed by the king despite the fact that
he didn't really have the qualifications
to be the captain of a ship like this.
This is an indictment of the monarchy and
it's important to remember that we're at
the period in French history called the Restoration.
The monarchy has been restored.
The French revolution had failed.
Napoleon had become emperor.
Napoleon had been deseated and a king,
a monarch, was once again on the throne of France.
A corrupt monarch was once again
on the throne of France.
Exhibiting this painting was really
rubbing salt in that wound.
Steven: What's interesting is that
humanity is brought down to its essential form here.
All of the pomp and ceremony of the court
certainly has been stripped away.
This is a painting that is about
man and his essence.
Beth: If we look back to neoclassicism,
[David] has given us heroic figures who were
willing to sacrifice themselves for a cause,
for what was right, for liberty and equality.
Here we have figures who have nearly died,
and many of their compatriots had died,
all because of corruption.
There's no heroism, there's no cause,
there's no patriotism, we've really left
neoclassicism far behind and we're
moving toward romanticism.
Steven: Romanticism and this painting,
it's the triumph of emotion itself.
(music) ("In The Sky With Diamonds" by Scalding Lucy)