Théodore Géricault

After a year in Italy, Géricault returned to Paris in the autumn of 1817. The impact of studying Michelangelo's Last Judgment and the challenge of developing a composition with many dynamic figures likely inspired the artist to turn to Peter Paul Rubens' "Small Last Judgment" of 1619 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich). Géricault knew Rubens' composition through Jonas Suyderhoef's 1642 reproductive print "The Fall of the Damned," and it is from the print that he copied passages in 1817-18. Lorenz Eitner explored how these studies after Ruben's fall of the damned played a critical role in the creation of Géricault's "Raft of the Medusa."
Géricault chose to copy two groups from the print. The right side of this drawing replicates a group found on the right of the print featuring men and women in the act of falling, desperately trying to grab on to each other for support and screaming. The group at left is taken from the lower left of the print, which describes a group of figures on the ground being tortured by snakes and demons. He changed the figure at far left from one with hands clasped in a pleading gesture and gaze directed upward to a more forlorn figure with its head buried in its hands. A related copy after the Suyderhoef print featuring the cluster of bodies at the center is in the Stanford University Museum of Art (67.50; Bazin 1941). The Stanford sheet served as the basis for a lithograph of the group by Eugène Déveria, published in 1825 (Bazin 1941a).
Curiously, when Déveria inscribed the sheet as a gift to a friend named "Forster," he turned the sheet counter-clockwise, making it vertical, which mimics the verticality of the print, even if it does not make sense with the motion of the bodies.