France Left 150 People to Die at Sea. A Painter Exposed Them. скачать в хорошем качестве

France Left 150 People to Die at Sea. A Painter Exposed Them.

In 1816, at least 147 people were abandoned on a raft off the coast of Africa. After 13 days of starvation, murder, and cannibalism, only 15 survived. When the rescue ship finally appeared on the horizon, it passed right by without seeing them. Three years later, a 27-year-old artist named Théodore Géricault decided to paint what happened. To get it right, he visited morgues every day. He brought severed limbs back to his studio to study decay. For two weeks, he kept a decapitated human head on his roof, drawing it as it rotted. The result became one of the most famous paintings in history, and one of the biggest political scandals of 19th-century France. The Raft of the Medusa wasn't just a painting about a shipwreck. It was an indictment of government incompetence, a revolutionary statement about who gets to be a hero in art, and the work that launched an entire artistic movement. Géricault placed a Black man, a Haitian model named Joseph, at the apex of the composition, making him the visual hero of the scene at a time when that was almost unheard of. The painting caused outrage at the 1819 Paris Salon. Critics called it a "pile of corpses." But in London, 40,000 people came to see it. It influenced Delacroix, Turner, Courbet, and changed the course of Western art history. Now it hangs in the Louvre, where its caption reads: "The only hero in this poignant story is humanity." Théodore Géricault, Raft of the Medusa, shipwreck painting, French Romanticism, Louvre Paris, famous paintings, cannibalism at sea, art history, Méduse shipwreck 1816, political scandal art, severed head artist, morgue visits artist, survival story, abolitionist art, Black hero painting, Jean Charles model, artistic obsession, Delacroix influence, Neoclassical vs Romantic, maritime disaster art, government incompetence, false hope painting, pyramidal composition, Caravaggio lighting, art history documentary, masterpiece analysis