The arrival of early 20th-century avant-gardism is generally considered the historical tsunami that swamped the conventions of Western art dating from the Renaissance. Yet this wave had begun building 100 years earlier with the rise of Romanticism, a sort of liberation movement for the artistic spirit. Its pioneers included Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault (1791–1824), a French painter whose explosive masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819), became a landmark of Romantic art.Géricault, the son of a lawyer whose family ran a tobacco business, conceived the work as a history painting with ambitions to match. Measuring 16 by 23 feet, it conformed to the scale of what was deemed serious art but departed from the standards of the day with its dynamic style and controversial content: Instead of relying on the usual mythological allegory or encomium to the state, Géricault ripped his subject from the headlines, basing the work on a scandal that had recently roiled France. The Raft of the Medusa, then, was the product of both local imbroglio and broader currents sweeping across Europe.Romanticism, which emerged in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars and encompassed music and poetry as well as art, was a reaction to the Enlightenment of the 1700s, which held that religion and faith must relinquish themselves to the power of reason. This embrace of rationalism found expression in Neo-Classicism, a revival of Greco-Roman art and architecture that prioritized order, symmetry, and civic virtue, making it a useful propaganda tool for both the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte. Neo-Classicism became so entrenched in France that it remained the house style for its artistic gatekeeping institution—the annual Salon—well into the 19th century.In contrast, Romanticism claimed that reason alone shortchanged personal agency by ignoring sensation. “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth,” Baudelaire wrote, “but in a way of feeling.” The result was a whole new approach to art that resonated with passion and worship of the sublime (i.e., nature’s power to overwhelm the senses), a pastoralist ideology that permeated the work of writers and painters alike.The Romantics also espoused national self-determination as an inalienable right connecting people to their land, no small matter for a continent still divided between empires. The Romantic poet Lord Byron, for example, became a significant figure in Greece’s war of independence against the Ottomans during the 1820s, giving his money, support, and eventually his life to the struggle.Even more radically, the Romantics championed the notion that political power lay in popular will and that no state can claim legitimacy without the participation of the masses. The call for emancipation of all stripes—including the abolition of slavery—was also a feature, as was a critique of industrialization and urbanization.All of which bent Romanticism in liberal, even revolutionary, directions. And yet, some of its tenets—its visions for a bucolic, prelapsarian society; its linkage of blood and soil—became the basis for Fascism and Nazism.The story of The Raft began in 1816 when a French naval frigate named Medusa sailed for Senegal, an African colony that had seesawed back and forth between French and British control until Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815. The Medusa carried a complement of officials and bureaucrats to reclaim the territory under the provisions of the Treaty of Paris (1814), which had returned it to France.Her captain, Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, an incompetent who hadn’t been to sea in two decades, was given command thanks to highly placed connections within the Bourbon monarchy under King Louis XVIII. He ran the ship aground near Mauritania, necessitating the evacuation of 400 passengers and crew. While senior officers and worthies were bundled aboard launches, the remainder, some 146 men and 1 woman, were consigned to a raft made from the ship’s wreckage that was meant to be towed along. Once this proved physically impossible, the raft was cut loose. Various catastrophes—storms, people and supplies washing overboard, mutiny, starvation, thirst, and cannibalism—ensued over the two weeks the raft was adrift. When it was rescued, only 15 individuals remained. Two of them would write a book about the ordeal. As for Chaumareys, he was court-martialed for his actions but acquitted on all charges.To create the painting, Géricault interviewed survivors and built a scale model of the raft. He traveled to the Normandy coast to observe the effects of water, wind, and sky. To capture the corpses that had piled up aboard the doomed craft, he made studies of cadavers at a hospital morgue. He apparently locked himself in his studio and refused visitors while he worked.The painting debuted at the Salon of 1819 and was acclaimed and disparaged in equal measure. Géricault had imposed a heroic framing on what was essentially a black eye for the government, shocking the public with a scene of desperation and squalor elevated to monumental proportions.For maximum drama, Géricault chose to depict the moment when the rescue vessel was spotted. It is pictured as a tiny speck on a horizon churning with swells. To emphasize the queasy rocking of the raft, the action is composed as two triangular configurations tilting away from each other. Ropes holding the mast form one triangle on the left, while the other, at right, grows out of figures clambering over one another to get a view of their salvation—a writhing pyramid that culminates in a shirtless sailor seen from the back, waving a handkerchief as he is held aloft by a companion.The raft is littered with the dead and dying, including a young man sprawled out at bottom left, who, save for socks, is brutally naked. The lad is kept from slipping into the water by a bearded old man trapping the body between his knees. Seated hollow-eyed with a red cloth draped over his head, he leans on his right arm in a distracted gaze. Yet there’s something about his pose that endows him with the sagacity of a Greek philosopher, as if Géricault were mocking Neo-Classicism.Because the signaling man appears to be African, The Raft has been interpreted as a jeremiad against slavery, and it is true that the Medusa’s original destination was a major hub in the Atlantic slave trade. But whatever else it may have represented, The Raft of the Medusa ultimately endures as a symbol of senseless tragedy transformed into pictorial triumph.