ABSTRACT
Theodore Gericault’s 1819 Raft of the Medusa is considered to be the epitome of the Romantic sublime with its emphasis on extreme states of psychological and physical suffering, deprivation, morbidity, and death. In Gericault’s eloquent fabulations of the flesh, the body retains the traces of the last moments of the individual, a human being with whom contributors can identify. Gericault serves as a type of ideal case study of how art and anatomy became confluent in the early years of the nineteenth century. The mid to late eighteenth century in France witnessed the renascence of anatomical study in art education after a long period that corresponded with the Rococo in art when it had been disparaged by the Academie Royale. Many surgeon/anatomists of the period wrote manuals of anatomy for artists, replete with illustrations based on dissections. Gericault was sensitive to the expressive potential of anatomical fragments as signs of the absent body.
