Théodore Géricault from Private Collections

11 ) copies the central group of figures in the engraving, while the present work takes on two different figural motifs: the mass of tumbling bodies to the right of the central group, and the anguished figures who have already fallen to the ground in the lower left corner. These studies after Rubens occupy an important place in the evolution of The Raft of the Medusa , Géricault’s greatest and most ambitious work. Géricault took the Raft ’s subject from a gruesome and politically explosive contemporary event, the thirteen day ordeal of the victims of the shipwrecked frigate Medusa (see cat. 13 ). In numerous compositional and figure studies of c. 1818 , Géricault explored different episodes of the widely reported story, including a mutiny against the junior officers, cannibalism, and the sighting of the ship that rescued the few survivors on the raft. Rubens’s Fall of the Damned evidently provided a model for creating configurations of desperate, doomed bodies in a dynamic, yet coherent composition that retained the integrity of each individual figure (Eitner, 1971 , p. 53 ). In addition, individual figures from Géricault’s copies of the Fall of the Damned provided motifs that continued to evolve throughout the course of his work on the Raft . The river god-like figure tormented by a serpent in this drawing evolves into a central figure in Géricault’s composition for The Mutiny on the Raft of the Medusa (fig. 12 ): the man on his back (bottom center) who struggles with a rope between his legs as he tries to halt his fall into the sea. By the final version of the Raft (fig. 13 ) , he has undergone a startling transformation as the emaciated, half-naked corpse who lies on his back in the extreme right foreground, head submerged. This drawing includes at least one other figural motif that would ultimately assume the shape of a corpse on the Raft. The damned figure who falls head first, seen from the back, elbows bent and hair flying forward, was surely an inspiration for the figure that Géricault had in mind when he asked the young Delacroix to pose for him in his studio in 1818 – 19 . Géricault directed his models to assume specific poses corresponding to the figure groups that he had developed and refined over the course of his many compositional studies. The connection between Géricault’s drawing after Rubens and the figure that Delacroix posed for in the Raft —the dark-haired figure in the foreground who lies on his stomach, face invisible, his left arm stretched over a piece of wood, toward the viewer—is further strengthened by a double-sided sheet of drawings that Delacroix made after Géricault. The recto of Delacroix’s drawing (fig. 14 ) is a copy of a drawing by Géricault in which Delacroix is posing for the Raft . On the verso (fig. 15 ) are Delacroix’s freely handled copies of different figures from Géricault’s drawings after The Fall of the Damned— including, top center, the figure seen from the back, falling head first. (AK)