Romantisim Gericault
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There have been many great movements in the world of the arts. There have been movements spawned from political beliefs and movements set off by artist's love of nature. Though there have been many movements of art worthy of recognition, no other movement hits the viewer with its raw truth and beauty like the romantic style. The one artist out of that movement that captures the movements' passion for heroism and political messages like Theodore Gericault. His painting "The Raft of the 'Medusa'" painted in 1818 depicts the survivors of the wreck of the Medusa as they drift aimlessly in the sea.
The painting: "The Raft of the Medusa" portrays the grisly scene that the crew of the Medusa faced when their ship crashed off the coast of Africa. The paintings realism and use of light gives it a raw, unsettling sense of reality. The diverse looks on the faces of the survivors pans from utter despair to a sense of hope driven by the hunger pains and smell of rotting corpses. The painter of this masterpiece, Gericault, did a great deal of research into this painting. He studied the remains of the raft and built a model of it, interviewed the survivors and did sketches of the corpses of the bodies of the crew that did not survive...