At first, the painting was mounted high on a wall, but before the show opened, Géricault persuaded the organizers of the Salon to install the painting more prominently. It was presented under the generic title of Shipwreck Scene, in order to circumvent government censorship, but everyone who saw it recognized what they were looking at: the raft, the faces, the flesh, the horror. Some reviewers lambasted the scene as a "pile of corpses." Many were disturbed by its gruesome imagery and dark implications. But the wisest of Géricault's contemporaries understood what one French observer wrote: that "our whole society is aboard the raft of the Medusa."

​

- Jerry Saltz,

"The Medusa and the Pequod,"

Art Is Life, (2022).

​

​