Main content
Course: Europe 1800 - 1900 > Unit 2
Lesson 2: France- Romanticism in France
- Gros, Napoleon Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Stricken in Jaffa
- Gros, Napoleon Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Stricken in Jaffa
- Ingres, Portrait of Madame Rivière
- Ingres, Napoleon on His Imperial Throne
- Ingres, Apotheosis of Homer
- Ingres, La Grande Odalisque
- Painting colonial culture: Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque
- Ingres, La Grande Odalisque
- Ingres, Princesse de Broglie
- Ingres, Raphael and the Fornarina
- Géricault, Raft of the Medusa
- Géricault, Raft of the Medusa
- Géricault, Raft of the Medusa
- Géricault, Portraits of the Insane
- Eugène Delacroix, an introduction
- Delacroix, Scene of the Massacre at Chios
- Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus
- The cost of war: Delacroix, Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi
- Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People
- Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People
- Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People
- Delacroix, Murals in the Chapel of The Holy Angels, Saint-Sulpice
- Rude, La Marseillaise
- Romanticism in France
© 2024 Khan AcademyTerms of usePrivacy PolicyCookie Notice
Géricault, Raft of the Medusa
Théodore Géricault, Raft of the Medusa, oil on canvas, 193 x 282 inches, 1818-19 (Musée du Louvre, Paris) Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- Did anyone else notice they seem to be all caucasian except one darker skinned man and possibly another to the right just below right up the top, im not trying to bring race into it or saying we are different from eachother in any way just by the amount of pigment in our skin but the artist had a pallete of paint to choose from, do you think this was done on purpose?(5 votes)
- Gericault took this piece of art as an opportunity to comment on slavery. Since he was an abolitionist, the black man in his painting actually represents freedom. The slave waves the cloth hoping for someone to find him and the people on the raft. The more profound meaning of this would be that the slave is in reality signaling "save me", not only from the shipwreck, but from slavery itself.(23 votes)
- Why is it called the Raft of the Medusa.(8 votes)
- "Medusa" was the name of the ship. ("Meduse" in French).(18 votes)
- what year was theodore gericault born? What year did he die(1 vote)
- Born September 26, 1791, Rouen, France—died January 26, 1824, Paris.(3 votes)
- What do you mean by saying "contemporary subject"? Does this mean the particular event in the history?(1 vote)
- This painting is 193x282, is it one piece of canvas or multiple pieces of canvas joined together?(2 votes)
- No, it would be one piece! You could immediately tell if pieces were joined together. There were great looms that were used for building (weaving) canvas. The looms were commonplace--remember that all the ships had to have huge sails because they ran on wind power, although the canvas for this would have been made on wider looms. It is very easy to have a large loom for heroic pieces like ths. In fact, artists started painting on canvas because sail cloth was readily available and provided a strong surface if stretched over a frame. Before canvas, they used wood panels, or walls, or ceilings. Shipbuilding countries were the first to adapt to using sail cloth canvas as painting surfaces.
The way you can tell if the painting is one piece is that there isno seam
in the painting. A seam would absorb paint and reflect light differently across the surface, and would not lie flat. Early artists liked canvas because you could get big pieces without seams--the seams would be deadly to their art work.(1 vote)
- Can someone tell me the story in more detail?(1 vote)
- Why would there be decapitated people in a drowning ship?(1 vote)
- I don't see where you're getting the decapitated part, but the speakers did mention that cannibalism took part on the raft as a desperate effort to avoid starvation. I imagine that any dismembered body parts are there to represent that.(1 vote)
- Why can we say that exhibiting this painting in 1819 was like ‘rubbing salt in a wound’?(1 vote)
- Because the painting was basically "anti-government", and for the people who displayed it to do so would be uncomfortable for the government. That, in English, is what is meant by the phrase, "to rub salt into a wound". It means to intentionally make someone uncomfortable.(1 vote)
- Why are there so many dead bodies in French Art?(0 votes)
- At6:34please expand on Romanticism and emotion, versus Classicism and Neo-Classical painting.(0 votes)
- Whereas romanticism is associated with the release of passionate emotion and the imagination, Classicism and Neo-Classicism is tied to restraint, righteousness, and classical order.(1 vote)
Video transcript
(jazzy piano music) - [Steven] We're in the Louvre looking at Géricault's Raft of the Medusa. This is a massive painting. - [Beth] It's 16' x 23' and
it's important to remember that large paintings were
reserved for important subjects. Subjects that were generally ennobling, or that showed a heroic deed of some sort, and this painting could
not be further from that. It's not drawn from Ancient
Greek and Roman history, it's not a Biblical subject. - [Steven] The story behind the subject is one of the most gruesome
in the history of the sea, that had taken place
just three years earlier. - [Beth] The title of the
painting, The Raft of the Medusa is referring to a ship called the Medusa. - [Steven] It was part
of a small fleet of ships that were trying to reclaim
Senegal from the British, as a French colony. And it had about 400 people on board, many of them were settlers. There were about 150 soldiers. - [Beth] The man who
was going to be the new Governor of Senegal was also on board. - [Steven] The problems began
when the ship ran aground in the open ocean. There weren't enough lifeboats, and so the captain ordered
the ship's carpenter to construct a raft from some
of the lumber of the boat, to hold everybody that couldn't
fit into the lifeboats. - [Beth] Well, naturally, those
who went into the lifeboats were those of higher status, the captain, the
officers, the politicians, and those that ended up
on this makeshift raft were primarily the
soldiers and the settlers. The idea was that the raft would be towed. - [Steven] But within only a few minutes when the captain realized
that the lifeboat was being slowed by the raft, the line was severed and the raft was allowed to drift out to sea on its own. - [Beth] So, 150 people
were abandoned at sea. What happened on the raft was horrific. There was starvation,
murder, and of course the worst thing imaginable
that happened was cannibalism, and there were even
reports that some people were intentionally killed to
provide food for the survivors. - [Steven] And to
preserve the small amounts of supplies that remained. And all of this is depicted
in wrenching detail. The artist interviewed survivors. He made a full scale model in his studio. He created small stages with clay figures in order to organize the figures, and he even retrieved body
parts from the morgue, brought them back to this
studio in order to be able to accurately depict putrefying remains. - [Beth] You mentioned its
naturalism, its realism, but in some ways it's not at all real. The bodies are clearly based on Ancient Greek and Roman sculptures, on the studies of the nude figure that artists had to do at the Academy, this crescendo of this pyramid of figures. Clearly things were not organized
in this way on the raft. This is a composition by an artist making a statement, saying something. - [Steven] Creating a kind
of anti-heroic painting that is still in the visual
language of the Academy. - [Beth] The captain had
been appointed by the King. Now, the monarchy had
been recently restored. You had this revolution that began in 1789 that established a Republic in France that ended with the Napoleonic Empire and the restoration of the monarchy. - [Steven] But the King's representative, the captain of the ship, failed. When Géricault is painting this canvas, he's making a political statement that is anti-monarchic, anti-King. - [Beth] This was an incompetent captain who was appointed by the
King and completely failed those he was entrusted to protect. - [Steven] One of the most
powerful aspects of this canvas is the composition. The corner of the raft is at the lower center point of the canvas, and it feels as if we can step on to it. - [Beth] The raft is
tipped into our space. That corner is foreshortened. This composition is designed
to draw us in and up. The artist did many, many
sketches, he did his research, but in the end made this
decision specifically to draw us in. - [Steven] To make this
spectrum of emotion from madness to despair at the bottom left where we see a father
mourning that beautiful body of his dead son, to the upper right, where we see an expression of hope. - [Beth] The figure on
the right pushes off with his right hand and
lifts his left hand up in a last effort to be saved. All of the figures at this moment, when they see the ship on the horizon, actually a moment that
they will not be rescued, the rescue will take place
a couple of hours later. So, this is actually a
moment of false hope. There's a sense of rotting bodies, the stench of death is present here to me. If we think about Neo-Classical paintings like David's Oath of the Horatii, we have figures from classical antiquity sacrificing their lives for a purpose. They are heroes. Here, human life is taken
for no reason at all. People are dying because of incompetence, because of abandonment. - [Steven] And this is not neo-classicism. Géricault is hoping to establish a style that we call Romanticism. This is a style that is
concerned with human emotion. It's characterized by fluid brushwork, energized composition, with an emphasis on
diagonals, on movement. - [Beth] You could think
back to artists like Rubens the Elevation of the Cross,
the way that the bodies are fused together in a single motion. Romantic artists are
looking back to Rubens, they're not looking back as much to Ancient Greek and Roman art. The way that the Neo-Classical
artists had done. - [Steven] But they're also
concerned, increasingly, with human experience, and with the power and majesty of nature. Here expressed in the wave on the left that threatens to crash over the raft. - [Beth] The Enlightenment
had given people a sense that they could
control their environment, that they could craft a better
future for human beings, create a Republic of laws, get rid of the corruption of the monarchy, and yet here the corruption of a King has had terrifying ramifications. The Revolution had undone, in many ways, the power of the Church. There's no monarchy we
can have faith in anymore. Romanticism is very much
a style associated with this period after the
failure of the Revolution, and the failure of the
ideals of the Enlightenment. - [Steven] And as if to
underscore that idea, one contemporary critic,
after seeing this painting, said "We are all on the
Raft of the Medusa."