A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (19 page)

So let’s imagine something else he didn’t paint – ‘Scene of Shipwreck’ with the casting redistributed among the emaciated. Shrivelled flesh, suppurating wounds, Belsen cheeks: such details would move us, without trouble, to pity. Salt water would gush from our eyes to match the salt water on the canvas. But this would be precipitate: the painting would be acting on us too directly. Withered castaways in tattered rags are in the same emotional register as that butterfly, the first impelling us to an easy desolation as the second impels us to an easy consolation. The trick is not hard to work.

Whereas the response Géricault seeks is one beyond mere pity and indignation, though these emotions might be picked up
en route
like hitchhikers. For all its subject-matter, ‘Scene of Shipwreck’ is full of muscle and dynamism. The figures on the raft are like the waves: beneath them, yet also through them, surges the energy of the ocean. Were they painted in lifelike
exhaustion they would be mere dribbles of spume rather than formal conduits. For the eye is washed – not teased, not persuaded, but tide-tugged – up to the peak of the hailing figure, down to the trough of the despairing elder, across to the recumbent corpse front right who links and leaks into the real tides. It is because the figures are sturdy enough to transmit such power that the canvas unlooses in us deeper, submarinous emotions, can shift us through currents of hope and despair, elation, panic and resignation.

What has happened? The painting has slipped history’s anchor. This is no longer ‘Scene of Shipwreck’, let alone The Raft of the Medusa’. We don’t just imagine the ferocious miseries on that fatal machine; we don’t just become the sufferers. They become us. And the picture’s secret lies in the pattern of its energy. Look at it one more time: at the violent waterspout building up through those muscular backs as they reach for the speck of the rescuing vessel. All that straining – to what end? There is no formal response to the painting’s main surge, just as there is no response to most human feelings. Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) – how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining. Catastrophe has become art: that is, after all, what it is for.

And what of that earlier catastrophe, the Flood? Well, the iconography of officer-class Noah begins as we might imagine. For the first dozen or more Christian centuries the Ark (usually represented as a mere box or sarcophagus to indicate that Noah’s salvation was a premonstration of Christ’s escape from his sepulchre) appears widely in illuminated manuscripts, stained-glass windows, cathedral sculpture. Noah was a very popular fellow: we can find him on the bronze doors of San Zeno in Verona, on Nîmes cathedral’s west façade and Lincoln’s east; he sails into fresco at the Campo Santo in Pisa and Santa Maria
Novella in Florence; he anchors in mosaic at Monreale, the Baptistery in Florence, St Mark’s in Venice.

But where are the great paintings, the famous images that these are leading up to? What happens – does the Flood dry up? Not exactly; but the waters are diverted by Michelangelo. In the Sistine Chapel the Ark (now looking more like a floating bandstand than a ship) for the first time loses its compositional pre-eminence; here it is pushed right to the back of the scene. What fills the foreground are the anguished figures of those doomed antediluvians left to perish when the chosen Noah and his family were saved. The emphasis is on the lost, the abandoned, the discarded sinners, God’s detritus. (Should we allow ourselves to postulate Michelangelo the rationalist, moved by pity to subtle condemnation of God’s heartlessness? Or Michelangelo the pious, fulfilling his papal contract and showing us what might happen if we failed to mend our ways? Perhaps the decision was purely aesthetic – the artist preferring the contorted bodies of the damned to yet another dutiful representation of yet another wooden Ark.) Whatever the reason, Michelangelo reoriented – and revitalized – the subject. Baldassare Peruzzi followed him, Raphael followed him; painters and illustrators increasingly concentrated on the forsaken rather than the saved. And as this innovation became a tradition, the Ark itself sailed farther and farther away, retreating towards the horizon just as the
Argus
did when Géricault was approaching his final image. The wind continues to blow, and the tides to run: the Ark eventually reaches the horizon, and disappears over it. In Poussin’s ‘The Deluge’ the ship is nowhere to be seen; all we are left with is the tormented group of non-swimmers first brought to prominence by Michelangelo and Raphael. Old Noah has sailed out of art history.

Three reactions to ‘Scene of Shipwreck’:

a) Salon critics complained that while they might be familiar with the events the painting referred to, there was no internal evidence from which to ascertain the nationality of the victims, the skies under which the tragedy was taking place, or the date
at which it was all happening. This was, of course, the point.

b) Delacroix in 1855 recalled his reactions nearly forty years earlier to his first sight of the emerging Medusa: ‘The impression it gave me was so strong that as I left the studio I broke into a run, and kept running like a madman all the way back to the rue de la Planche, where I then lived, at the far end of the faubourg Saint-Germain.’

c) Géricault, on his death-bed, in reply to someone who mentioned the painting: ‘Bah, une vignette!’

And there we have it – the moment of supreme agony on the raft, taken up, transformed, justified by art, turned into a sprung and weighted image, then varnished, framed, glazed, hung in a famous art gallery to illuminate our human condition, fixed, final, always there. Is that what we have? Well, no. People die; rafts rot; and works of art are not exempt. The emotional structure of Géricault’s work, the oscillation between hope and despair, is reinforced by the pigment: the raft contains areas of bright illumination violently contrasted with patches of the deepest darkness. To make the shadow as black as possible, Géricault used quantities of bitumen to give him the shimmeringly gloomy black he sought. Bitumen, however, is chemically unstable, and from the moment Louis XVIII examined the work a slow, irreparable decay of the paint surface was inevitable ‘No sooner do we come into this world,’ said Flaubert, ‘than bits of us start to fall off.’ The masterpiece, once completed, does not stop: it continues in motion, downhill. Our leading expert on Géricault confirms that the painting is ‘now in part a ruin’. And no doubt if they examine the frame they will discover woodworm living there.

6
THE MOUNTAIN

Tick, tick, tick, tick. Tock. Tick, tick, tick, tick. Tock
. It sounded like a clock gently misfiring, time entering a delirium. This might have been appropriate, the Colonel reflected, but it wasn’t the case. It was important to stick to what you knew, right to the end, especially at the end. He knew it wasn’t the case. It wasn’t time, it wasn’t even a distant clock.

Colonel Fergusson lay in the cold square bedroom of his cold square house three miles outside Dublin and listened to the clicking overhead. It was one o’clock in the morning on a windless November night of 1837. His daughter Amanda sat at his bedside in stiff, pout-lipped profile, reading some piece of religious mumbo-jumbo. At her elbow the candle burned with a steady flame, which was more than that perspiring fool of a doctor with letters after his name had been able to say about the Colonel’s heart.

It was a provocation, that’s what it was, thought the Colonel. Here he was on his deathbed, preparing for oblivion, and she sits over there reading Parson Noah’s latest pamphlet. Actively disagreeing right to the end. Colonel Fergusson had long since given up trying to understand the business. How could the child he loved most have failed to inherit either his instincts or the opinions he had with such difficulty acquired? It was vexing. If he hadn’t adored her he would have treated her as a credulous imbecile. And still, despite it all, despite this living, fleshly rebuttal, he believed in the world’s ability to progress, in man’s ascent, in the defeat of superstition. It was all finally very puzzling.

Tick, tick, tick, tick. Tock
. The clicking continued overhead. Four, five loud ticks, a silence, then a fainter echo. The Colonel
could tell that the noise was distracting Amanda from her pamphlet, though she gave no outward sign. It was simply that he could judge such things after living so closely with her for however many years. He could tell she hadn’t really got her nose in the Reverend Abraham. And it was her fault that he could tell, that he knew her so thoroughly. He’d told her to go off and get married when that lieutenant whose name he could never recall had asked her. She’d argued about that, too. She’d said she loved her father more than her uniformed claimant. He’d replied that this wasn’t a sound reason, and anyway he’d only die on her. She’d wept and said he wasn’t to talk like that. But he’d been right, hadn’t he? He was bound to be, wasn’t he?

Amanda Fergusson now rested her book on her lap and looked at the ceiling in alarm. The beetle was a harbinger. Everyone knew that its sound portended the death of someone in the house within the year. It was the wisdom of ages. She looked across to see if her father was still awake. Colonel Fergusson had his eyes closed and was breathing out through his nose in long smooth puffs like a bellows. But Amanda knew him well enough to suspect that he might be bluffing. It would be just like him. He had always played tricks on her.

Like that time he’d taken her to Dublin, one blustery day in February of 1821. Amanda was seventeen, and everywhere carried with her a sketching book as she now carried her religious pamphlets. She had lately been excited by reports of the exhibition at Bullock’s Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, of Monsieur Jerricault’s Great Picture, 24 feet long by 18 feet high, representing the Surviving Crew of the Medusa French Frigate on the Raft. Admission is, Description 6d, and 50,000 spectators had paid to see this new masterpiece of foreign art, shown alongside such permanent displays as Mr Bullock’s magnificent collection of 25,000 fossils and his Pantherion of stuffed wild beasts. Now the canvas had come to Dublin, where it was put on view at the Rotunda: Admission is 8d, Description 5d.

Amanda had been chosen above her five siblings by reason of her precocity with water-colour – at least, this was Colonel
Fergusson’s official excuse for indulging his natural preference once again. Except that they did not go, as promised, to the Rotunda, but went instead to a rival attraction advertised in
Saunder’s News-Letter & Daily Advertiser
, one, indeed, which ensured that Monsieur Jerricault’s Great Picture did not triumph in Dublin as it had done in London. Colonel Fergusson took his daughter to the Pavilion, where they witnessed Messrs Marshall’s Marine Peristrephic Panorama of the Wreck of the Medusa French Frigate and the Fatal Raft: Admission front seats is 8d, back seats 10d, children in the front seats at half price. ‘The Pavilion is always rendered perfectly comfortable by patent stoves’.

Whereas the Rotunda displayed a mere twenty-four feet by eighteen of stationary pigment, here they were offered some 10,000 square feet of mobile canvas. Before their eyes an immense picture, or series of pictures, gradually unwound: not just one scene, but the entire history of the shipwreck passed before them. Episode succeeded episode, while coloured lights played upon the unreeling fabric, and an orchestra emphasized the drama of events. The audience was constantly moved to applause by the spectacle, and Colonel Fergusson would nudge his daughter heavily at some particularly felicitous aspect of the display. In the sixth scene those poor French wretches on the raft were represented in very much the same posture as that in which they had been first delineated by Monsieur Jerricault. But how much grander, Colonel Fergusson observed, to picture their tragic plight with movement and coloured lights, accompanied by music which he identified quite unnecessarily to his daughter as ‘Vive Henrico!’

‘That is the way forward,’ remarked the Colonel with enthusiasm as they left the Pavilion. ‘Those painters will have to look to their brushes.’

Amanda did not reply, but the following week she returned to Dublin with one of her five siblings and this time visited the Rotunda. There she greatly admired Monsieur Jerricault’s canvas, which though static contained for her much motion and lighting and, in its own way, music – indeed, in some fashion it
contained more of these things than did the vulgar Panorama. Upon her return she told her father as much.

Colonel Fergusson nodded indulgently at such pertness and obstinacy, but held his peace. On the 5th of March, however, he jauntily indicated to his favourite daughter a fresh advertisement in
Saunder’s News-Letter
announcing that Mr Bullock had reduced – had clearly been
obliged
to reduce, the Colonel interpreted – the price of admission into his immobile spectacle to a mere ten pence. At the end of that month Colonel Fergusson imparted the news that the Frenchy picture at the Rotunda had closed for lack of spectators, whereas Messrs Marshall’s Peristrephic Panorama was still being shown three times a day to audiences rendered perfectly comfortable by patent stoves.

‘It is the way forward,’ the Colonel repeated in June of that year, after attending by himself the farewell performance at the Pavilion.

‘Mere novelty is no proof of value,’ his daughter had replied, sounding a little too smug for one so young.

Tick, tick, tick, tick. Tock
. Colonel Fergusson’s faked sleep became more choleric. God damn it, he was thinking, this dying business is difficult. They just won’t let you get on with it, not on your own terms, anyway. You have to die on other people’s terms, and that’s a bore, love them as you might. He opened his eyes and prepared to correct his daughter for the several hundredth occasion in their lives together.