But then I saw one old picture that seemed, somehow, different from the rest. It was by Theodore Gericault, it was called The Raft of the Medusa, and it had something to say (or at least I thought it did) about me and my life. I thought I understood it, this enormous painting (and it is truly enormous: no shrunken reproduction can remotely do justice to its intimidatory scale) of men abandoned at sea, on a makeshift raft, desperately trying to attract the attention of a far-off ship.
Gericault's painting was based on a true story, but I knew that it was not really about a group of early 19th-century castaways. It was a metaphor. It was about wanting something, or someone that will almost certainly prove to be beyond your grasp - in my case it was the unattainable 19- year-old sister of the Parisian boy with whose family I was then staying to improve my halting French. It was about longing.
That, anyway, was my romantic adolescent reading of The Raft of the Medusa. Since then, I have changed my mind about the picture more times than I like to remember, but I have never quite grown out of my obsession with it. Last autumn the BBC gave me the chance to change my mind again when they commissioned me to write and present a film about The Raft of the Medusa. Having spent an embarrassingly large proportion of the last six months looking at the picture, reading books about it and talking to other people about it (a remarkable number of whom shared my obsession: The Raft of the Medusa seems to have a strange effect on those who come within its orbit), I finally know where I stand. I think I understand, at least just a little bit, the nature of its power; and what happens when a painting transcends its own time, leaps the barrier of history.
Gericault's masterpiece is one of the great pictures of human aspiration. And perhaps it is so powerful because it is at once so intensely, physically present - no artist has ever made the painted human form seem as palpable as Gericault did: the bodies in his turbulent painting spill out into the space of the viewer; the enormous hands of the dead and dying men in the foreground seem almost touchable - and yet also so thoroughly abstract. You don't need to have been lost at sea to respond to it, to identify with those frantically signalling men at the apex of its composition. We have all yearned for things that seem as out of reach as the distant speck of that painted ship on that painted horizon. Perhaps Gericault's painting has lasted so long, has become one of those pictures that are forever defying conclusive interpretation, because it can be the image of whatever secret desperation, whatever hope or disappointment, you want it to be. Gericault put us all on his raft.
The Raft of the Medusa has inspired numerous tributes, countless subtle and not so subtle reinterpretations of its themes of subdued violence and yearning, in art, music and literature. It is a painting that has launched a thousand cartoons, especially in France, where caricaturists have adapted its composition on many occasions to attack parties of both left and right: it is easily enough remade into an image of political aspiration gone terribly wrong, of rudderless politicians on course for national catastrophe. It made a sudden guest appearance in Goscinny and Uderzo's Asterix the Legionary, in which the eternally hapless pirates, whose ship has been sunk (yet again) by those indomitable Gauls, Asterix and Obelix, mimic the poses of Gericault's castaways. It was also a key if unacknowledged influence on Picasso's Guernica: Picasso borrowed his composition, the tension between ascending and descending energies, structured across a scything diagonal, directly from Gericault's painting.
But none of the reinterpretations or reworkings of The Raft of the Medusa has diminished the mystery of the original. Before Gericault, no artist had painted a picture about a current event on such an enormous, heroic scale - the picture was based on the most scandalous news story of the artist's time, the wreck of the French frigate Medusa and its catastrophic aftermath. The simple fact is that no one knows why Gericault chose to do so; nor why he painted the particular moment in the story that he did - the moment when the last few survivors, having sighted the ship that would eventually rescue them, are suspended between hope and despair; nor what he intended his picture to signify.
Julian Barnes included a wonderful, elegant homage to The Raft of the Medusa in his A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, which is hard to better as an account of the compelling ambiguity of a great work of art: '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.'
Barnes's chapter gave me and my director a lot of trouble when we were working on the BBC documentary about the Medusa. Our problem was simple. It was so good, such a convincing account of the process by which Gericault turned a true, ephemeral story into a timeless work of art. Barnes seemed to have thought himself so completely into Gericault's skin that there was no room for anyone else's imagination to go to work. Part of the brilliance of what he had written lay in the fact that it seemed to cut so cleanly through the Gordian knot of art-historical doubt that has always surrounded The Raft of the Medusa. Barnes argued that Gericault had willed that doubt into being - that he had painted an intentionally ambiguous painting.
Barnes looked exhaustively at the primary evidence, the hundred or so preparatory sketches that Gericault produced during his months of work on the picture. Pursuing an argument first advanced by Lorenz Eitner in his 1982 Gericault monograph, he noted that Gericault had chosen the moment of maximum uncertainty in the Medusa story, and showed how Gericault gradually heightened that uncertainty as he worked up his sketches into his finished painting: stretching the distance that separated the men on the raft from the rescue vessel until it became a bare speck in the distance; cropping and adjusting his image until it became what it still is today, a universal image of longing.
But still I wasn't absolutely sure that I believed in Barnes's Gericault, this canny coverer of his own traces, this premeditated seeker after artistic immortality, this careful, careful painter of a deliberately impenetrable, mysterious masterpiece. And I wasn't sure that Barnes had said all there was to say about The Raft of the Medusa. Our problem was how to find an alternative to the Barnes version, to find another way of imagining ourselves back into Gericault's life.
Richard Holmes's book Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, suggested a possible approach: 'a kind of pursuit,' as Holmes there describes his approach to biography, 'a tracking of the physical trail of someone's path through the past, a following of footsteps'. We went to France on Gericault's trail, more in hope than expectation. And we did find, almost everywhere he had once lived, peculiar, unpredictable traces of the man who painted The Raft of the Medusa. In each of Gericault's different milieus, it seemed, someone was keeping the flame of his memory alight. We met a group of enthusiasts who call themselves Les Fous de Gericault, 'Gericault's madmen' - some of them experts, some of them amateurs. We met historians, doctors and the deputy mayors of two small provincial towns which Gericault had visited, and found that each had different stories to tell - about Gericault's politics, about his private life - which cast The Raft of the Medusa in an entirely new light. At various times during the making of the film, I became convinced that Gericault's painting was (in no particular order): entirely unambiguous political propaganda; the disguised autobiographical confession of a man hopelessly in love with a woman forbidden to him; a picture about Gericault's subconscious desire for God. Somewhere along the way I might have found out the truth about Gericault's painting, but I'm not sure.
The fact is that none of the interpretations which I heard could be backed up by anything as substantial as factual evidence. Gericault died young, leaving virtually no letters behind him, and it seems impossible to separate the real man from the myths that have subsequently grown up around him. We don't even know what Gericault looked like. The most famous portrait of him, the statue on his tomb in Pere Lachaise cemetery, shows him as a monk-like ascetic, a gaunt-faced man with a shaven head. But the portrait was sculpted years after Gericault's death and its most striking feature, that shaven head, was based on a legend: the apocryphal story that Gericault shaved off all his hair before he began work on The Raft of the Medusa, put into circulation by wishful-thinking biographers with a vested interest in turning him into the prototype of the tortured Romantic artist.
But perhaps interpretation, too, is always a form of myth-making. Perhaps the truth is that when we try to decipher any work of art, and discover the true intentions of its creator, what we are really doing itself amounts to a form of creative (or at least fictional) activity. We like to think we are being objective, so we say that the meanings we invent aren't ours, they were the artist's. We say we didn't make it up, he put it there. But perhaps we make him up too; and perhaps we always make him up in our own image.
Re-reading Julian Barnes's chapter recently, it occurred to me that I was not really reading about Gericault at all. Barnes's careful, fastidious artist, this habitual modifier and adjuster - he sounded suspiciously like everything I imagined Julian Barnes himself to be. We can attempt to imagine ourselves into a dead man's shoes, but we take our own feet with us. The great works of art are the ones that force us to make that attempt - but the truth is that when we talk about the art and the artists that truly move us we are always, in the end, talking about ourselves.
'The Raft of the Medusa' will be shown on BBC 2 on Sunday 11 April at 8.20 pm. Two of Gericault's sketches for the painting are currently on display in 'Tradition and Revolution in French Art 1700-1800', at the National Gallery to 11 July.
(Photographs omitted)
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