The Raft of the Medusa

Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa of 1818 is the defining masterpiece of French Romanticism, depicting survivors of the 1816 shipwreck of the Medusa frigate — whose officers had abandoned the lower-class passengers on a makeshift raft — after thirteen days at sea. The painting was a political indictment of the Restoration government that had appointed an incompetent Royalist captain and then attempted to suppress the scandal. Géricault interviewed survivors, studied corpses, and built a scale model of the raft to achieve historical accuracy. The painting's enormous scale, the horror of its subject, and its refusal of any consolatory resolution made it the founding act of French Romantic painting's engagement with social truth.

The monumental canvas (491 × 716 cm) builds a pyramidal composition from the dead and dying at the base to the desperately signaling survivors at the apex. Géricault's intense study of corpses and medical specimens gives the flesh an unflinching realism.