The Raft of the Medusa

A fascination with female victimization dominated American ideal sculpture in the mid–nineteenth century, most notably in such captivity subjects as The Greek Slave, but also in a variety of works that represented women in peril.Randolph...

~The Salon of 1806 had been the scene of Girodet’s great claim to equality with David in Scene from a Deluge (pl. 167). It also...

The massive fragments of classical sculpture – the hand and foot that the diminutive figure of Fuseli/the artist contemplates with such regret on the opening page of Linda Nochlin’s The Body in Pieces (fig. 5.1) – provide the perfect basis for this...

Robinson Crusoe, a novel of shipwreck, was the book Rousseau recommended above all others for the education of young boys like Emile...

~FRIEDRICH is recognized today as the supreme German painter of the Romantic era, but in his own time his genius was not so widely acknowledged. This was not because the aims of his art were foreign to the interests of his generation. On the contrary, his allusions to the spiritual in nature, his close study of local landscape and his emphasis on the need...

A black silhouetted against the sky has a place of key importance in Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, one of the greatest and most enigmatic paintings of the early nineteenth century ...

A fundamental conflict characterised both the theories and practices of painting in nineteenth-century France. On the one hand, allegiance to an inherited tradition of Italianate clair-obscur provided the rationale for painting dark to light: modelling in a subtle gradation of blended half-tones separated thinly glazed, transparent shadows and opaque impasted lights. In contrast,...