"Come Back, You Bastards!"

[Christine]

Long review by Graham Robb of Jonathan Miles's Medusa: The Shipwreck, the Scandal, the Masterpiece in this week's London Review of Books.

The online edition is subscription-only. But the gist of the article is that the survivors' account by Correard and Savigny, which became an instant bestseller, is an unreliable self-aggrandising whitewash by a bunch of murderous snobs. There was also a great deal of political point-scoring in their account which portrayed themselves as honourable young men representing Romantic liberalism, while the disaster was caused by a corrupt monarchical regime represented by an incompetent, cowardly captain, Chaumareys.

The painting itself so terrified Eugene Delacroix, who posed for one of the figures, that he ran all the way back to the far end of the faubourg Saint-Germain.