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Story of medusa5/29/2023 A sign of hope lies on The Raft of the Medusa's horizon. By July 17, 1816, only 15 men remained when a ship called Argus happened upon them, rescuing this surviving 10 percent five died soon afterward. On the eighth day, things went from really bad to brutal as the hardier survivors pitched overboard the weak and wounded, still alive but helpless to save themselves. To staunch their starvation, they turned to cannibalism. The first night, 20 expired from suicide, fighting, and being washed overboard. There were approximately 150 seamen on the Medusa, and they died quickly and gruesomely. The Raft of the Medusa depicts the latter part of a 13-day journey. From there, Géricault used the raft as an eerie model. The carpenter Chaumareys tasked with transforming the doomed Medusa into a raft was employed by the painter to build a true-to-life model in his studio. Théodore Géricault even had the raft reconstructed. The Raft of the Medusa measures roughly 16 feet by 23.5 feet meanwhile, the raft itself was 23 feet by 66 feet. The Raft of the Medusa is bigger than you'd expect. Géricault experimented with various models and wax figures, studied drowned cadavers at the morgue, and carefully planned how to fill the massive canvas he'd prepared for his masterpiece. He even attended the indictment trial of the ship's captain, Viscount Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys. Obsessed with this tragic tale, Géricault not only interviewed and sketched the Medusa crewmates, but also read everything he could find about the harrowing event. Artist Théodore Géricault did exhaustive research before laying brush to canvas. Shortly thereafter, Géricault drew his inspiration from the accounts of two survivors. Only 10 of approximately 150 people who boarded the raft lived through this catastrophe. A shortage of lifeboats sent sailors scrambling to build a raft. Remarkably, the ship survived these maritime battles only to crash on a sandbank in 1816 during an attempt to colonize Senegal. The Medusa (or Méduse) was a French naval frigate that boasted 40 guns and fought in the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century. But the story behind this 1819 painting is far richer and more tragic than you might imagine. A wrenching scene of shipwrecked men helpless in the grips of the ocean, Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa is heralded as one of the most influential works of French Romanticism.
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