G?ricault, Raft of the Medusa발음듣기
Géricault, Raft of the Medusa
(music) ("In The Sky With Diamonds" by Scalding Lucy) Beth: We're in the Louvre and we're looking at Géricault's enormous painting, the Raft of the Medusa from 1819.발음듣기
The story very quickly is that there was a merchant vessel that was often off the coast of Africa, it hit a storm and the captain realized that the ship was going down.발음듣기
He asked the carpenter to take some of the lumber from the ship and to fashion a raft because there were not enough lifeboats.발음듣기
For the most part, the crew and the captain took the actual lifeboats and put the rest of the passengers on the raft.발음듣기
They were going to tow the raft behind them, but when the captain saw that he couldn't make any way pulling the raft, he actually ordered that the rope be cut.발음듣기
Géricault shows us the moment when they see the ship that will save them on the horizon; they've just glimpsed it and they're frantically waving down this ship.발음듣기
The Raft of the Medusa is the size of a history painting and yet it is not a history painting, it is not mythology, it's not history, it's not a religious painting, it is a contemporary subject.발음듣기
Steven: The artist has worked for years in his studio to replicate, and accurately as possible, the shipwreck going so far as to actually ask the same carpenter to rebuild the raft in his studio; 발음듣기
to go to the morgue, to look drowned bodies, to study everything he could to make it as precise as possible and yet, this is not photographic in any way.발음듣기
This is using all of the traditions of history painting in order to create this tour de force, this incredibly powerful, emotional image.발음듣기
Beth: For all of his efforts to be accurate in some ways, rebuilding the raft, reading of all the newspaper reports ...발음듣기
Beth: Right, and as you said, going to the morgue, surrounding himself at times with decapitated heads and amputated arms and limbs in order to keep himself in a kind of gruesome frame of mind of death and mortality.발음듣기
There's this strange mixture that we often see actually in romanticism and this is a kind of proto-romantic painting of mixtures of the real and the unreal.발음듣기
Steve: This is a painting, first and foremost, that is about the relationship between man and nature, and the relationship between man and man.발음듣기
This is a painting that's about feeling, but it's an expression of feeling through the physical body and so this is an artist who's looked at Michelangelo quite clearly, but if you start at the bottom left of the painting and you look at the older man who's mourning the now drowned body of his son, this is terrible despair.발음듣기
As you move upward towards the upper right into this apex of hope as we see people trying to flag down that distant ship which seems almost impossible for them to be seen.발음듣기
Look at the bodies, there's so much darkness amongst them it almost seems like those limbs might not belong to individuals, but they are part of some multi-limbed beast.발음듣기
Beth: That idea of fusing bodies into a single action is something that Géricault would have borrowed also from Baroque art.발음듣기
If you study all the sketches Géricault created for this painting, and he did dozens of sketches and several oil sketches and worked on it, as you said, for a long time, you see that what he worked toward it moving the raft more and more into the viewer's space.발음듣기
It's not even taking place in the foreground, it's taking place in our space, foreshortened down into the viewer's space, really making this effort to engage us very directly and very emotionally.발음듣기
Steven: Those bodies, both the one whose head is hidden from us and probably just underwater, seems like it's literally just under the frame of the canvas.발음듣기
Beth: The other really important thing about this painting is not just that Géricault took this contemporary subject and painted on the scale and in the style of a history painting, but that he took a politically sensitive subject.발음듣기
The issue was that the captain of this ship who had abandoned these people on the raft had been appointed by the king despite the fact that he didn't really have the qualifications to be the captain of a ship like this.발음듣기
This is an indictment of the monarchy and it's important to remember that we're at the period in French history called the Restoration.발음듣기
Napoleon had become emperor. Napoleon had been deseated and a king, a monarch, was once again on the throne of France.발음듣기
Beth: If we look back to neoclassicism, [David] has given us heroic figures who were willing to sacrifice themselves for a cause, for what was right, for liberty and equality.발음듣기
Here we have figures who have nearly died, and many of their compatriots had died, all because of corruption.발음듣기
There's no heroism, there's no cause, there's no patriotism, we've really left neoclassicism far behind and we're moving toward romanticism.발음듣기
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