ABSTRACT

Depicted in a scene of men lost at sea on a makeshift raft, Gericault’s exhausted survivors, mired in hopelessness, lacked all moral fiber. Unable to transcend their plight, they deserved their fate. However, few if any of the Salon’s visitors studying the Raft observed that far from jettisoning art’s traditional tropes of heroism and honor, Gericault had vested them in a different guise, an unfamiliar face to Gericault’s cohorts and one they could neither discern nor accept. Indeed, if the Louvre’s visitors could not see the Raft’s challenge it was because its moral fiber was couched in a black body, one they deemed ignoble. The black body they could not see was the signaling black, a dark-toned muscular figure set at the forward-most end of the raft. Capping a pyramidal rise of desperate figures clustered about his person, Gericault’s apical black waves a scrap of cloth before him hoping to attract a passing vessel that appears on the far horizon.