ABSTRACT
Theodore Gericault was engaged in a larger project, to paint contemporary history, but as a history without heros. For Gericault this imagined, hoped-for audience might well have been based on the template of the Vernet circle. Gericault became the painter of the apparently defeated, of the shipwrecked. For Gericault the artist, the philosophical impetus that the new medicine of psychophysical reciprocity offered had to be supplemented with willed identification and with first-hand, physical experience. Gericault does not demonise the child abductor, who seems equally to invite the viewer's imaginative sympathy. The child abductor might also be a philosopher of the people, albeit prey to the gravest misgivings. Jean-Etienne Esquirol was among eminent subscribers to the survivors' relief fund; the shipwreck of course owed its continuing position in public consciousness above all to Gericault's painting. Pinel's manie ambitieuse, and, later certain of Esquirol's monomanias, stood for a "socially propelled malaise of the soul", in Lisa Appignanesi's phrase.
