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uncle mikey Aug 22, 2008
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The Raft of the Medusa (French: Le Radeau de la Méduse) is a work by the French painter Théodore Géricault. Controversial at its first appearance in the Salon of 1819, it attracted passionate praise and condemnation. The painting reflects one of the greatest post-Napoleonic scandals of French history concerning the French frigate Medusa, which struck the Bank of Arguin off the coast of Mauritania on its voyage to Senegal in 1816. Most of the Medusa's crew and soldiers were forced to board a makeshift raft, and were then cut from a towline and left to drift in the open ocean. The scene depicts the desperate survivors at their first moment of apparent rescue. Of nearly 150 initial castoffs on the raft, only 14 were saved after surviving their ordeal by resorting to cannibalism. A political statement condemning incompetent but politically well-connected anti-Bonapartist royalist leaders --- and an artistic achievement that galvanized romantic painting breaking from neoclassical style. |
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