Le teste tagliate

In 1818 Géricault was 27 and working himself toward a single enormous canvas about a recent scandal, the wreck of the French frigate Medusa, whose survivors had drifted for days on a raft. To paint death convincingly he wanted to study it directly, so he brought severed limbs and heads back to his studio from a hospital and the executioner's yard and watched them change over the days. This is one of those studies. A woman's head lies pale with its eyes shut while a man's tips back with mouth and eyes open. He arranged them on a cloth almost like a still life of fruit. The heads carry the marks of the guillotine, a machine that had been busy in Paris within living memory.