... of wine - and human meat - to sustain them. The tragedy was blamed on official negligence and created a political scandal. Gericault depicted the instant when the survivors first saw the rescue ship, and he went to extraordinary lengths to achieve authenticity. He interviewed survivors and drew their portraits, he had a model of the raft built, and he even studied corpses in the morgue. Such a choice of subject matter, and the presentation of a dramatic moment, are typical of Romantic painting, and forcefully illustrates the extent of Gericault's break from the balance, chill, and calm of the prevailing Neo-classical school. The great artist Theodore Gericault impressed by the catastrophe created his famous picture "The Raft of the Medusa": in it he gave his own view of the atmosphere of the disaster. The painting is enormous, sixteen feet high, twenty-three feet, six inches wide. Joseph Mallord William Turner ...

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