Théodore Géricault from Private Collections

use different figural and compositional strategies to convey its classical theme— sculptural, dense, and relief-like in the exhibition’s example, spatially deep and extensive, with serpentine configurations and flowing movement in others. As a group, they prefigure the deeply exploratory, probing approach to narrative and configuration that would characterize Géricault’s studies for the Race of the Barberi Horses and the Raft of the Medusa . For Géricault, the multi-figured composition posed an overarching problem: to distill the dramatic power of a story into a single moment or scene, and to frame this moment in the authoritative format of history painting, with the physical and expressive power of classicism and the Old Masters. During his sojourn in Italy ( 1816 – 17 ), which he financed on his own, Géricault’s drawings included many subjects observed on the streets of Rome, rendered in a realistic or popular style of characterization (cat. 11 ) and, of course, his studies for the Race of the Barberi Horses . As both Wheelock Whitney and Eitner have noted, the artist’s studies for his large, narrative projects involved the constant repositioning and reworking figural motifs that often make their first appearance in the early stages of the process. A case in point is the rearing horse in the two studies for the Race (cat. 9 – 10 ), a central motif from the earliest studies. These particular examples highlight the artist’s regard for the powerful musculature of the horse’s flank and the superb line of its profile. Géricault’s perpetual recasting of figural motifs over the course of a composition’s evolution reaches its apogee in the drawings for the Raft of the Medusa . The sheet of studies after Rubens’ Fall of the Damned of 1818 (cat. 12 ) belongs, as Eitner noted, to the early gestation of the Raft . 7 In addition, particular figures on the study sheet, most notably the reclining figure who resembles a river god, tormented by a serpent between his legs, and the figure who falls head first, elbows bent, thick hair flopping forward, were early sources for motifs that Géricault continued to rethink and transform as he explored different episodes of the Medusa story. The study sheet’s anguished river god evolves into the drastically foregrounded, central figure of the Mutiny episode—the one who lies on his back and struggles with a rope between his legs—and, finally, into the