An emphasis on the importance of imagination.
Romantics legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority.
To help elevate the individuals on the raft to heroic status Géricault
allowed his imagination to heavily influence his depiction of the
survivors on the raft. A good example of this is the exaggerated
muscular bodies of the survivors. In reality the survivors who had
been adrift at sea for 13 days and had begun to resort to cannibalism
would have looked quite different.