“Gericault was a negative visionary; for though his art was almost obsessively true to nature, it was true to a nature that had been magically transfigured, in his perceiving and rendering of it, for the worse. ‘I start to paint a woman,’ he once said, 'but it always ends up as a lion.’ More often, indeed it ended up as something a good deal less amiable than a lion - as a corpse, for example, or as a demon. His masterpiece, the prodigious Raft of the Medusa, was painted not from life but from dissolution and decay - from bits of cadavers supplied by medical students, from the emaciated torso and jaundiced face of a friend who was suffering from a disease of the liver. Even the waves on which the raft is floating, even the overarching sky are corpse-coloured. It is as though the entire universe had become a dissecting room.” Appendix VII, Heaven and Hell, Aldous Huxley

Vincent van Gogh self-portrait with pipe, 1886