Raft of the Medusa

On a makeshift raft adrift at sea, the survivors of a wrecked French frigate heap among the dead and dying, and at the summit of a great rising pyramid of bodies a Black sailor waves a scrap of cloth toward a ship barely visible on the horizon. Gericault based the Raft of the Medusa on a true scandal of official negligence, researching corpses and madness to paint it. Now in the Louvre, it is a monument of Romanticism - despair and desperate hope surging upward in a single diagonal, private catastrophe made vast and accusing.