Peregrinations

The Louvre’s macabre masterpiece

Anthony Peregrine

Two hundred years ago this week, 147 French sailors and maritime passengers were cast adrift on a raft off west Africa. They ended up fighting, killing, and eating the dead. Extreme, then, even for French seafarers. Scandal and uproar ensued in post-Napoleonic France. More to our point, the episode inspired one of the greatest, and biggest, paintings of the 19th century.

At 16ft by 24ft, Géricault’s

is not too far short of the raft it depicts. The vast work fills a wall in the Louvre’s Denon Wing, (around the corner from the Mona Lisa). I’ve occasionally gazed at it to the point of sea-sickness.

The story is simply told. In early summer 1816, the frigate Medusa was taking French officials to assume control of Senegal, ceded to France by Britain after the fall of Napoleon and restoration of the monarchy the previous year.

Predictably, it was captained by an old incompetent who hadn’t been to sea for 20 years, an aristo given command because he was a monarchist. He ran the ship aground 50 miles off Mauretania. Lifeboats were insufficient for the 400 crew and passengers, so a raft was rapidly built. It was to be towed by the lifeboats. But, fearful for their own safety, folk in the lifeboats cut the ropes.

The raft was powerless, the 147 bereft of supplies. They fought, they chewed leather belts and hats to fend off starvation, they chucked the weak overboard and finally tipped over into the taboo of cannibalism.

When picked up 13 days later, on July 17, only 15 survived (of whom, five died shortly afterwards). Back in Paris, two survivors wrote a best-seller, blaming the disaster on the naval command and, by extension, the entire backward-facing Restoration regime.

Meanwhile, 27-yearold Théodore Géricault saw his chance to make a name by committing the tragedy to enormous canvas. His preparations were prodigious. He interviewed survivors, visited morgues to get the right deathly skin pallor and filled his flat with body parts (including a severed head from a lunatic asylum) to act as “models”. Finished in 1819, the painting found some favour in France, much more in a London invariably thrilled by evidence of killer French bungling.

entered the Louvre only after Géricault’s early death, from TB, in 1824. There it remains, immensely more overwhelming than any image you’ve recently summoned to your smartphone. Experts will tell you it’s an evolution of classicism towards romanticism. I’ll tell you that there’s so much going on, the work threatens to surge from the frame and sweep you away.

So, please, after you’ve scrummed down before the Mona Lisa, skip next door for the Louvre’s real art action. Then you can leave. You’ve had your money’s worth.