Deconstructing ‘The Raft Of the Medusa’
By: Vashik Armenikus
Tags: Creativity, Art History, History, Art, Painting

‘Géricault allowed me to see his Raft of Medusa while he was still working on it. It made so tremendous an impression on me that when I came out of the studio I started running like a madman and did not stop till I reached my own room.’ ~ Eugène Delacroix, Diaries 1817

Delacroix was not the only one who was driven close to madness by the Gericault’s painting. Since its creation ‘The Raft of Medusa’ instilled a fanatical and even religious devotion among its admirers. This is not surprising since it is impossible not go mad, when you face unimaginable horror that it depicted.

Towards the Catastrophe.

In June 1816 a French frigate named Medusa with two other ships in its convoy departed from the French port of Rochefort. Medusa carried 400 people on board and was bound to the port of Saint-Louis in Senegal.

The captain was Viscount de Chaumereys, an aristocrat appointed to the position by the king Louis XVIII, but who had not sailed in the last 20 years.

In an attempt to make a good time, de Chaumereys decided to overtake two other ships, Echo and Argus, but due to his inexperience and poor navigation the ship drifted 100 miles off its course.

A day later, on the second of July, de Chaumereys ran Medusa aground off the coast of West Africa. Due to lack of lifeboats on board it was not possible to evacuate all 400 passengers at once, the plan was to make two trips to the shore and back. The supplies that remained on board were planned to be towed with the use of a small makeshift raft.

Alexandre Corréard, a young engineer from Paris, started constructing the raft. It had to be strong enough to carry many barrels of wine, food, passengers’ belongings and no more than 10 people who will help to stir while it was being towed.

Not long after the construction of the raft, Corréard noticed that Medusa’s front was beginning to slowly collapse and leak. The fear among those who remained on board increased as the weather began to change and brought strong ocean waves which hit the doomed Medusa with increasing ferocity.

This created a panic amongst the passengers who were considered to be ‘low-ranking’ members of the ship, which included the soldiers, sailors and Corréard himself. The spaces on the lift boats were already taken by their superiors. Moreover, since the captain ordered to load the makeshift raft with the supplies first, the space on it was getting scarce as well.

In fear of drowning, the remaining 147 passengers jumped on the small raft that was towed by the lifeboat. The raft went well beyond its capacity. Whilst throwing some of the barrels and provisions overboard did free up space, it did not decrease the weight of it quite enough.

The panic among those on the raft increased and some tried to jump on the lifeboat towing it. At that moment the captain made the decision that later became a symbol and an allegory of injustice — he cut the rope between the two vessels sending the members of the raft adrift 13 days.

The bitter taste of despair

Insomnia drove the French painter Théodore Géricault mad after he read about the fate of those 147 people on board of the raft. Only fifteen survived and only two out of the fifteen were willing to tell what happened afterwards. One of the two was the young engineer Alexandre Corréard.

The year after the tragedy, Géricault met Corréard in the former’s home, and some say he was mystified by the fact that Corréard was eating whole lemons whilst he recounted the events.

Corréard’s story was not one of hope and heroism, but of madness and despair. This went against the accepted notion that the intellectuals of France had at the time. French political philosophers portrayed the human nature as essentially good. They claimed that all existing evil was born from the corrupt institutions that spoil the human nature. ‘Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains’ said the French political philosopher Rousseau.

But the story that Corréard told Géricault proved Rousseau’s theories absolutely wrong.

For the next 13 days, each passenger of the doomed raft fought for his own survival against everyone else. This was not the world of ‘good natured’ people that was described by Rousseau, but it was the world described by another more pragmatic philosopher — Thomas Hobbes — who wrote that ‘the condition of man… is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.’

It took only three days, since the ‘Medusa’ ran aground, for the first cases of cannibalism to occur on the raft. At first they did not kill to eat, only those who drowned were eaten. But it was not long after when the strong and healthy began to kill those who were weak and ill.

When small mutinies threatened to leave no one alive on board, the passengers of the raft agreed to throw their weapons into the sea. But, that did not help to avoid more deaths from violence.

On the eleventh day, fate mocked them cruelly. A butterfly flew next to the raft and then landed on a barrel. Those doomed passengers saw this as if God was communicating with them through nature. The butterfly reminded them of the Biblical story of Noah who received a olive branch in the beak of a dove after surviving the Great Flood.

Two days later, the raft was spotted by an English ship ‘Argus’, only 15 out of 147 people initially on board remained alive at that time. The English captain and his crew were so horrified from what they witnessed that some historians write the captain went insane months later.

Géricault soon understood why Corréard was eating lemons in such large quantities. The acid taste of the fruit helped the young engineer to rid of the foul taste of human flesh he devoured whilst onboard of that damned raft.

The Anatomy of the Painting

Well, so which moment of this catastrophe did Géricault chose to draw?

He could have drawn the moment when the Medusa struck the reef; or the moment the captain cut the tow-ropes; or the murderous mutinies at night; or the moment when the butterfly landed on the raft.

But he didn’t. Instead he chose the moment when the passengers of the raft saw the ship in a far distance. We might think that this is the moment, when the English ship ‘Argus’ rescued the doomed sailors of the raft.

Detail of ‘The Raft of Medusa’ by Théodore Géricault | Wiki Commons

In truth, Argus did not initially notice the raft when it passed it for the first time. It appeared in the horizon for a half an hour (far but close enough for the members of the raft to see) and then disappeared. Géricault focused his work at this moment of a sudden intense hope and the equally sudden and intense despair.

‘Some believe it is still coming towards them;’ — writes Julian Barnes in his book Keeping an Eye Open — ‘some are uncertain and waiting to see what happens; some know that it is heading away from them, and that they will not be saved. This figure incites us to read ‘The Shipwreck’ as an image of hope being mocked.’

But the painting — or any artwork — that survives is the one that outlives its story. If Géricault wanted momentary fame at the risk of creating political scandal, he could have drawn the moment of cutting the tow-rope, or the scenes of cannibalism.