Glacial Errata, No. 83

One

In the late 1810s, Theophile Géricault painted a series of images of severed heads and limbs. It’s generally assumed that these were done in preparation for his famous The Raft of the Medusa, and when you find these online, that’s generally how they’re presented.

(Content warning: the rest of these are a good deal more detailed and graphic. I’ve put a lot of space between this and the next one in case you’d like to nope out of these images.)

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Two

But, as multiple art critics have noted, none of the faces or postures in these works appears in the Raft painting, and most actual historians now agree that they are likely autonomous works that, in the words of Gary Tinterow, “portray frankly the gruesome beauty of death.”

Three

Géricault was preoccupied with capital punishment and anatomical dissection, making repeated trips to witness gallows executions and guillotining; as a social reformer, it seems likely, according to art historians, that he was at least sympathetic to abolitionist movements, and he may have made these images as potential sketches for work to be used to argue against capital punishment. If so, such a project never came to fruition, and their ultimate intention isn’t quite known.

Four

But at the time, the prevailing Romantic aesthetic was increasingly embracing a gritty realism, complete with gruesome displays of murder, blood and depravity, as a reaction against and critique of classical conservatism. In the wake of the Revolution, the Terror, the Napoleonic Wars, many artists in France had come to see the Enlightenment’s promise of a rational utopia as a false promise. And one way or another, Géricault was certainly working in this idiom.

Five

In the words of art critic Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, “In his pictures of severed heads and limbs, Géricault matched horrific content and outrageous form, setting the stage for a new aesthetic, of the realistic and modern, in rebellion against the conservative establishment of his time. To this end, he brought together concerns of different, yet interconnected sorts: he articulated references to the gruesome social realities of the day with genre noir strategies of shock, terror, black humor, irony, and surreal fantasy. Whereas the Raft of the Medusa was a public political and aesthetic manifesto, these works, most of which never left the artist’ studio, were Géricault’s private but equally militant assertions of aesthetic and ideological freedom.”