*This is the fourth installment of a five-part series on the evolution of large-scale French Painting as seen in the premiere wings of the Louvre in Paris.**
As a flagship painting of the Romanticism movement, The Raft of the Medusa by Theodore Gericault was actually one of the first to usher in the new style at the beginning of the nineteenth-century. Gericault was primarily self-taught as he only received a few years of academic artistic training. He traveled throughout Europe spending most of his time in Rome, like Ingres and David. Yet, Gericault favored the drama and movement within Baroque and Mannerism rather than looking to the classical ideals of the Renaissance and ancient Rome. The Raft of the Medusa illustrates how Gericault utilized these movements to improve upon the burgeoning Romanticist tendencies. The painting also highlights the schism that was starting to form within the Parisian salons as artists began to venture away from the dominant Academic style of David and Ingres. Romanticists felt that the Neo-classical emphasis on line, balance and order left paintings rather static and stiff. They favored color over line as their means of evoking the necessary emotions within the dramatic scenes. In addition, Romanticism artists like Gericault preferred contemporary stories from the headlines that were removed from mythology and the ancient past or the kings, queens and imperial rulers of their day. Painting needed to be like The Raft of the Medusa: current, dramatic and highly expressive. The Raft of the Medusa cannot be understood fully without knowing the story behind the image. Gericault took the dramatic story of the Medusa straight from the French headlines. In 1816, the Medusa set sail alongside three other ships to the African coast of Senegal. The boat out sailed the others and while staying dangerously close to the coast, it ran aground. Eventually all passengers had to abandon ship. The wealthy were dispersed into the lifeboats while a large group of nearly one-hundred and fifty less fortunate individuals was forced to create a make-shift raft. Either accidently or on purpose, the raft was cut loose from one of the lifeboats and was abandoned at sea for nearly two weeks. Eventually, the people were rescued, but only fifteen survived. Shortly after, stories of murder, cannibalism, deathly storms and insanity arose. The story was perfectly suited for Gericault’s Romanticist ideals. Gericault directly challenged the academies by placing a modern subject on such a large-scale. Typically, large-scale painting was reserved for historical painting like the Oath of the Horatii or to commemorate historical events such as The Coronation of Napoleon. Even Ingres scaled down his image of a concubine in La Grande Odalisque in order for his work to be deemed more acceptable. Gericault, however, chose a story from his day filled with scandal and intrigue. As later Romanticism artists continued to believe, Gericault felt modern subjects were just as worthy of being placed on the grand-scale as he showed with The Raft of the Medusa. The artist continued to break away from the academic style and showed his alignment with Romanticism through his dramatic use of color, composition and modeling. In stark contrast to the Neo-classical and academic paintings of David or Ingres, Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa is all about movement and drama. Rather than arranging them stiffly as David did in Horatii, Gericault captures the movement necessary to evoke the desperation experienced by those on the raft through a less orderly composition. Figures are arranged along a sharp diagonal of despair to hope. The lower left and other parts of the foreground are filled with people flung about dead, dying or decaying. Figures in the top right, however, frantically wave to a ship along the horizon, the Argus— the ship that will eventually be their salvation. To further the contrast between hope and desperation, Gericault utilizes a less extreme form of Caravaggio’s tennebrism. Light is not evenly filtered as seen previously, but now it is starkly contrasted to evoke a particular emotion from the viewer. Although every figure is perfectly modeled and formed, their muscle structure is highly idealized in order to further capture the movement within the painting. Gericault studied from real models and cadavers, but also recalls Michelangelo’s Mannerist ignudi by adding muscles to emphasize movement through the composition. Little criticism can be drawn from the Academics, however, when Ingres also took artistic liberties with the human form. Although Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa marks the beginning of Romanticism, he still utilizes the sharp brushstroke of the academics. As the movement develops and progresses, ultimately, this will diminish over a looser, more painterly line that further emphasizes the drama necessary for a Romanticism painting.
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