???? The Raft of the Dead: The True Story Behind the Painting #Art #TheRaftOfTheMedusa #DarkHistory

"The Raft of the Medusa" by Théodore Géricault is one of the most disturbing paintings in the Louvre. It depicts the aftermath of the wreck of the French frigate Méduse in 1816.

Due to the incompetence of the Captain (a political appointee), the ship ran aground off the coast of Mauritania. The wealthy officers took the lifeboats, leaving 147 sailors and soldiers stranded on a makeshift wooden raft. What followed was 13 days of hell.

Without food or water, the men turned on each other. Mutinies broke out, and dozens were thrown into the sea or killed in hand-to-hand combat. By the fourth day, the survivors were forced to resort to cannibalism to stay alive.
Géricault was obsessed with capturing the horror accurately. He interviewed two of the survivors (Savigny and Corréard) and even brought severed limbs and heads from the morgue into his studio to study how dead flesh changes color. The painting captures the moment the 15 remaining survivors spotted the rescue ship, the Argus—a tiny speck of hope on the horizon.

Look closely at the man lying face down in the bottom left corner with his arm outstretched.
That isn't a random model. That is Eugène Delacroix, another famous French painter (who painted "Liberty Leading the People"). He was a young friend of Géricault and posed as one of the corpses for this masterpiece.

#ArtHistory #TheRaftOfTheMedusa #Gericault #DarkHistory #SurvivalStory #Cannibalism #FrenchHistory #Louvre #TrueCrime #Painting #Art