Raft of Medusa

Theodore Gericault, born in Rouen in 1791, was a profoundly influential French painter, who exerted a seminal influence on the development of Romantic art.   From his youth, Gericault developed a brilliant and rapid execution capturing vividly the sense of movement. In the 11 years of his career as an artist, Gericault became an admirer of Michelangelo and Baroque works, continuing to display his interests in a sense of swirling movement and even his taste to romanticism. Gericault went to extreme lengths of collecting amputated heads, arms and legs, as research and to develop a better idea of the human body’s movement and expressions. From collecting these body parts Gericault was able put paint to canvas and started to covey a real idea of the human body and how it moved, the expressions and feelings the body produced and the muscles definition. This would later help Gericault paint his famous “Wrath of Medusa”.
Gericault’s painting; “The Wrath of Medusa” was inspired by a sinking ship (the Medusa) that sunk in 1816 off the coast of West Africa, due to the incompetence of the captain. The ship was abandoned, officers and important passengers went off by lifeboats, while the rest of the one hundred and fifty people, who where on the ship, were set adrift on a hastily constructed raft. When a ship found the raft, it had been twelve days after the sinking, and 135 people had died, as sunstroke, suicide, murder and even cannibalism had taken its toll. Gericault researched the incident thoroughly and exhibited his painting three years later in 1819, which was seen as much more political and going against the government than it was artistic. As the Government wanted to cover this historical event up and didn’t want anybody in the world to know about it. “The Medusa” stirred the pot so much that Gericault was not allowed to exhibit the painting under the name, “the Wrath of Medusa” and had to change it instead to, “The Scene of the Shipwreck”, in order for it to be...