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Rating: 02 July 1816, service cruise to Senegal, then a colony, of the French frigate "Méduse".
The ship is commanded by Lieutenant of Vessel Hugues de Chaumarey, a brilliant example of how an Officer or any man qualified to command his peers and, even worse, means, can, with an excessive dose of incompetence and a pinch of arbitrary arrogance, send the poor members of the crew to their deaths. A crust of bread should always be given to those who cannot bite into it.
The ingenious navigator, skilled and experienced reader of nautical charts, overlooked the irrelevant detail that they were dated 1753 (!), managing, with method, impeccable disregard for danger, and steel dedication, to run aground the ship on a sandbank 5 meters below sea level. A bit like if today, 2011, I were puzzling over how to outsmart the guards of the wall to go from the East side of Potsdamer Platz to the Brandenburg Gate. Discovering, with surprise no less, that the obstacle is remembered with a strip of porphyry traced on the asphalt. Astonishing!
To give a touch of "noir" to the story, the frigate ran aground about 87 nautical miles from the coast, and to conclude in style and "suspense," the sea conditions were absolutely favorable. Force 5/6 of the Douglas Scale. Needless to say, the workers will pay the dishonorable toll of the ninetieth degree lying on a lifeboat that will be absolutely molded by the furious waves for several days. Exasperated hunger, hysteria, suicides, and cannibalism were the tragic protagonists of the event until the exhausted rescue by the Argo. The story tells that of the 152 occupants, only 15 will remain alive on the raft. The rest will be swallowed by the sea and uncontrollable hungry animals. It was enough to induce the good Géricault to transfer the tragedy on canvas.
The core of the work is the contrast. Of physical expressions, manifestations of pathos, feelings, colors. The true strength of the painting, the artist's touch of genius, lies in going against the current. In an image illustrating a shipwreck, one should perceive the overwhelming hegemony of the sea, the dominant phenomenon of the scene. Géricault reduces it to a background element, or rather, a disturbance I dare say, subtly hiding it among waves, which, despite everything, are rendered not too menacing, to further poison the already tested unfortunates.
A fairly established practice would see, in a typical scenario, extensive use of cool colors, further influenced by the presence of the agitated sea. Navigating upwind, Géricault prefers a wide use of warm colors, luminous bodies, with a voluntary dominance of red, intended to make the scene "sanguine". No propulsion can be more significant, effective, in such a situation. That of blood in giving vigor to the exhausted limbs of the castaways, now resigned. Except for the corpses, with limbs left to the irregular movements of the waters, there are those who have the strength to resist fate to the point of climbing to wave their presence to the salvation that miraculously appeared on the deep horizon. You can read the unnatural effort to attract attention, those contractions at the limit of strength with nerves driven more by inertia than by will, to demonstrate once again that even in a journey to the end of the night, sooner or later, the moon must give way to the sun.
Notable is the "reading" direction of the work, from left to right from a graphical point of view and vice versa from an emotional one. As for the first point, starting from the left, it seems that the cluster of castaways forms a dead body that takes shape in a few gradual steps, to reveal itself in all its beauty, rising with force towards the hope spotted on the horizon. Starting from the corpse caught in the hull and dragged by the current, one crosses the kneeling souls, wounded, bitten, until reaching the highest peak indicated by the sailors climbed on the barrels to make themselves visible to the rescue ship.
Retracing our gazes, it is possible to grasp the depth of the painting, touch its soul, and nail its pathos. It seems to hear the cries of the waving sailors that manage to awaken the hopes now dormant of the kneeling figures. The latter strive towards those cries, effort to follow their origin to ease that disbelief translated into grimaces on those tired faces. Paradoxically, the penultimate figure seems not to hear the raging joy of those cries. It seems not to want to believe it, or even not to want to hear it, with that glacial pessimism that transpires from an apparently extinguished, vacant look. Its last will is to exploit the last forces to hold back that lifeless body, thus giving the impression of being an intruder, in the complex of the representation.
"...the sea erases, at night. The tide hides. It is as if no one had ever passed. It is as if we had never existed. The sea is without roads, the sea is without explanations..."
Alessandro Baricco - Ocean Sea
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