Fatally, one crucial landmark was mistaken for another, and on July 2, the Medusa headed directly into the bank. Members of the crew knew the maneuvers to steer around this grave danger, but the ship’s arrogant leadership ignored them. ![]() Within days, a man was lost overboard, and with mistrust rising, others began seeking ways to get around Chaumareys.īy July, the Medusa was approaching the deadly Arguin Bank, an expanse of shallower water off the coast of West Africa that had wrecked numerous ships. Chaumareys separated from the rest of the rest of the fleet and soon was sailing alone. The ship was inadequately outfitted, carrying faulty maps and too few lifeboats. The people onboard, some 400 in all, were a mix of monarchists, families, merchants, mercenaries, and ex-convicts. The Medusa’s captain was Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, a 52-year-old royalist who hadn’t been to sea in decades. In June 1816, the French frigate Medusa and three other ships headed to Senegal to resume trade, eventually including the slave trade, which had been interrupted by the Napoleonic Wars. The painting I saw that day at the Louvre had its origins in a real-life story of the recolonizing of Africa. Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Nina Simone singing “Strange Fruit,” and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now all make you experience alienation, rage, horror, revulsion, love, grace, ugliness, absurdity, hopelessness, bloodlust, bleakness, memories of meetings and partings, nightmares, phantoms, cultural dysmorphia, shapeless inner shadows, the shattering collapse of moral order, and the decay of the soul - all at the same time. But the deep content of this 500-year-old sculpture - its aesthetic substructure, its crux and lifeblood - includes ideas about sensuality, beauty, majesty, pathos, the power of the self, the potentiality of movement, the grandeur of being alive, inchoate softness of marble, even the awareness of the recently rediscovered Laocoön and His Sons, a Roman statuary so radical it seems to have almost given Michelangelo a nervous breakdown. The subject matter of Michelangelo’s David is a biblical tale told in marble. From romping Greek gods to a Sunday in the park to the cutout silhouette of a white man beating a slave. From gleaners in a field to luncheons on the grass. This is what Marianne Moore meant by “hope not being hope / until all ground for hope has / vanished.” This is that moment.Įvery work of art tells a story, from outlined hands on cave walls to figures arrayed at a table for a Last Supper. Yet the work itself paradoxically gives hope for its very presence. Some are reckoning with their wounds others seem to be coming to terms with death some appear closer to damnation than to life. It is a collective ash heap of individually vivisected souls stripped bare of humanity.Įach of the men is marked by a distinct, unforgettable gesture. Their poses suggest a classical frieze, like Elgin marbles from hell. We see a large raft bearing a crowd of male figures at the mercy of heaving seas. The Raft of the Medusa is massive in scale, yet its subject matter is as simple as bathers by a river, cows in a field, a birth in a manger. That painting was Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. The moment I saw it, something like Krakatoa went off within me. It was a cosmographic perpetual-motion machine, a purgatorial charnel house. ![]() ![]() On that day, during my first pilgrimage to the Louvre, I laid eyes on a painting that seemed the sum of all things. I was in Europe for the first time, on my way through Paris to Warsaw with my Polish girlfriend, on a bizarre quest to sell blue jeans behind the Iron Curtain. The first time the power of art pulled the rug out from under me, I was 19 years old.
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