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A number of painters in the Romantic period, and some before it, believed imagery
should present situations, states of suffering, and outrage in forms that were
extreme and compelling in themselves. These images, they thought, would stimulate
the sympathy and satisfaction that were regarded as salutary and sublime - indeed
they envisaged a situation in which agony as such would create a demand for
experience that would in other contexts be intolerable. Among these uncommon
spirits the painter Géricault was quite exceptional. He generated images
of physical grandeur, brushing light into dark with an impulsive bluntness,
which was a direct manifestation of natural force. He portrayed, for example,
triumphant heroism, valiant defeat, splendid savagery, and animal magnificence,
all of them with irresistible nobility and pathos.
In the last years of Napoleon's rule Géricault painted the military
myth on a grand scale and interested David. With the Restoration, he was painting
subjects of barbaric violence and accumulating studies of injuries and executions
when history provided him with the shipwreck of an ill fated expedition and
the desperate suffering of the survivors. Within a year he had painted The Raft
of the Medusa, a picture of pathos and protest outstanding in the history of
art. It equipped romantic realism with a terrific commitment to humanity and
an equally terrific style, in which the ruthlessness of the square brushed modeling
and the livid light were unforgettably compelling. Five years later, after extending
his repertory of extreme situations to the pathos of the insane, he died in
a fall from a horse. Once he was dead, the regime which his great picture had
arraigned found no difficulty in buying it. The most sincere protests have a
way of turning into sensational aesthetic entertainments. It is apparently the
nobility and insight in themselves that fulfill the deeper needs. The loss of
Géricault depleted the French reserves of seriousness through the half
century to come, sadly but not fatally. |
