The Raft of the Medusa

Théodore Géricault

1818

Géricault plunged viewers straight into a nightmare of survival with this massive, chaotic scene of shipwrecked sailors clinging to a makeshift raft. To capture the gruesome reality of the 1816 Medusa disaster, the artist actually interviewed survivors, studied corpses in the Paris morgue, and even kept severed limbs in his studio to observe decay! The composition pulls your eye from the dead and dying in the foreground up to a desperate pyramid of figures waving at a tiny, barely visible rescue ship on the horizon. It became the ultimate scandal and masterpiece of French Romanticism, completely ditching classical heroes for raw, messy human suffering.

Technique

Oil on canvas

Location: Musée du Louvre, Paris