6. Theodore Géricault – Heads Severed 1818
Géricault became increasingly interested in the naturalistic rendering of distressed anatomy, and started making frequent trips to the morgue at the Hospital Beaujon in Paris. Initially these trips were intended simply to sketch body parts, but Géricault eventually found beauty in the severed limbs and heads he was studying, and the artist began painting these horrors as subjects in their own right. At the time, there were programs in local morgues to lend human remains to art students for anatomical study – something like a lending library of body parts. Géricault would take various body parts home to study them as they went through varying states of decomposition and putrefaction. The artist was in fact known to hide various heads, arms, and legs under his bed, or even store them on his roof, so he could continue to render them in increasingly putrid states and from various angles. Artlyst hopes he washed his hands.