Study of the composition of Géricault’s work
In a week there were 28 survivors but many of them were sick and injured or in a state of dementia, they decidedsalt water and even its own urine and in a few days there had already been cases of cannibalism. As the survivor Savigny explained and Corréard despite the disgust they felt, cut the meat of the bodies into strips and let it dry in the sun before eating it, he said: "We saw that horrible food as the only means of prolonging our existence" they passed13 days sailing, the fifteen survivors who were in the raft saw a boat that approached them, was a flotilla ship that sailed next to the jellyfish and had arrived at his destination in Saint-Louis. Chaumareys, who had also managed to get there in a boat, had sent him not so much to rescue the survivors, who cared little, as well as to recover the material from the raft. In 1817, two of the survivors of the expedition, the surgeon Jean-Baptiste Savigny and the engineer-geographer Alexandre Corréard, published a book entitled “Shipwreck of the Frigate of the Medusa” story that told the events that occurred in the raft and inThe one who denounced both the negligence and cowardice of the captain and the atrocity of the terrified and drunk sailors This caused that a shock in France, gacetas, pamphlets and engravings to evoke with great detail the horror of the event would be unleashedcaused the liberal opposition to the Bourbon regime to denounce the incompetence of the monarchy and force the resignation of the Minister of the Navy to institute a war council against Chaumareys, which was sentenced to three years in jail.
As for the composition of the work Géricault combined the attraction for the events in themselves and for the explanations given by Savigny and Corréard that were in many aspects questioned and discussed by the governor of Senegal and the naval authorities, in addition these were clear The personal responsibility that Savigny had taken in the decision to resort to murder and cannibalism as a means of survival for themselves and that of her shipwreck partners, likewise there was talk of a woman who was on board the cantinera who was injured broken by the thigh; These details Géricult the plasma in his work portrays all this terrible experience of the shipwrecks, willing to capture with realism so he decided to go to the hospitals to see in person the bodies of the injured men and take some dead to his house with the help of A medical friend, Géricault took out some curtured members and took them to his workshop: legs, hands, thigh fragments, beheaded heads, this allowed him to carry out different studies of the composition on the two episodes of horror in the raft, the First the mutilation of the mutineers and the posterior cannibalism, thus I carry out different sketches of study of these compositions before carrying out this work. Géricault set out to choose the exact moment, we can reinforce it with the knowledge that Cartier Bresson postulates about the capture of that decisive moment from the analogous photography in the same way Roland Barthers speaks of how painting stops the gesture in time, this It is also possible to appreciate in the analogous chamber but in this case it is to understand how the painting is able to make a temporary detention of a gesture is like "the photographic moment" so called Barthers said that the painters had the government of the composition where They could choose which moment they were going to stop in the narrative to create a composition of the work and thus based on this time where there is more emotionality and excitement, it is those moments that painters choose as Jacques-Louis David in The dinner or in this case Géricult in the balsa of the jellyfish where he looks and finds the moment in which the rescue ship was seen in the distance when the Ang Ustia overflowed them in the des A catalog of feelings experienced by the shipwrecked of resignation to hope there we can also realize these bodies that speak to us in a speech, tell us narratives and emotions.
From my personal criteria the main theme of this picture is the hope or lack of it in the left side of the work I perceive emotional and physical death, but as we ascend through that pyramid, light is glimpsed, life represented by that tinyboat in the background in that dawn between the storm;In addition, with this pyramidal composition, it suggests a new way of see.
By 1819 he presented his work in the room, but had certain inconveniences when not knowing where to locate it since the organizers had hung it at a point too low on the wall what seemed bad to him so he decided to raise him, butWhen contemplating it, I noticed that it did not favor him since the bodies and the raft had been treated with such judgments and thorough detail that the viewer could not perceive it because Géricault had decided in his composition to put the figures in the presence of the spectator in order to produce theIllusion of a space overflow of these, therefore the painting lost strength the more he walked away from the viewer, so he decided to locate it in the lower part. Currently the work is located in the Louvre Museum hanging in the lower part where all these details can be assessed by all spectators such as the hand of the unconscious young man in the lower part, it should also be remembered that the Louvre MuseumIn Paris it is a modern institution that occurs within the XVII and XIX.
In the last years of Gericault’s life, I paint the painting of the jellyfish and at 33 he died this was one of his last great jobs. Géricault was characterized by being a public artist, he was still a painter of the isolated heroic figure and with this work of the raft he managedacclaimed by the Academy and received a medal from this.
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