Géricault and Delacroix

It was at the École des Beaux-Arts that Delacroix met Théodore Géricault, whose Romantic canvases, such as The Raft of the Medusa (Plate 15), made an impact on him. Delacroix posed as one of the foreground figures in this work, which was somewhat controversial due to its heroic and realistic treatment of a contemporary news story of French naval troops and settlers, shipwrecked on their way to Senegal and signalling to another vessel for help. The painting's departure from grand, literary and classical themes was regarded as a disturbing challenge to tradition, given its adoption of the scale and importance of history painting. The graphic, realistic portrayal of human suffering was an implicit challenge to classical idealisation. In order to draw the bodies of the figures, the artist had made studies from actual corpses and severed limbs. Nevertheless, Géricault's essential inspiration remained the academic, classical nude (he had seen and admired work by Michelangelo). What he achieved was a radical reworking of classical norms. He massed together writhing figures into a composition, marked by dramatic diagonal lines, that threatens to topple the 'stable' classical pyramidal figure groups it contains (one surmounted by a signalling figure, the other by a mast). The final result, a muscular and energetic reinterpretation of a classical style, provided an example that was to be well taken by Delacroix.It was at the École des Beaux-Arts that Delacroix met Théodore Géricault, whose Romantic canvases, such as The Raft of the Medusa (Plate 15), made an impact on him. Delacroix posed as one of the foreground figures in this work, which was somewhat controversial due to its heroic and realistic treatment of a contemporary news story of French naval troops and settlers, shipwrecked on their way to Senegal and signalling to another vessel for help. The painting's departure from grand, literary and classical themes was regarded as a disturbing challenge to tradition, given its adoption of the scale and importance of history painting. The graphic, realistic portrayal of human suffering was an implicit challenge to classical idealisation. In order to draw the bodies of the figures, the artist had made studies from actual corpses and severed limbs. Nevertheless, Géricault's essential inspiration remained the academic, classical nude (he had seen and admired work by Michelangelo). What he achieved was a radical reworking of classical norms. He massed together writhing figures into a composition, marked by dramatic diagonal lines, that threatens to topple the 'stable' classical pyramidal figure groups it contains (one surmounted by a signalling figure, the other by a mast). The final result, a muscular and energetic reinterpretation of a classical style, provided an example that was to be well taken by Delacroix.

http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/history-art/delacroix/content-section-3.2