Well, for the past few days I've been studying some works of art, somewhat as a hobby, and as some of you already know, we're beginning a homeschooling process at home. We've partly borrowed some ideas from classical education. One of them is art appreciation. I've found it very interesting in that regard, and I wanted to share with all of you, if you like, a day to regularly appreciate a famous work of art.

I've been looking for interesting facts and putting them into a Word document. Obviously, it's in Spanish. This post has been translated by Google. Perhaps later I'll edit the Word document more elegantly and make it look like a book. For now, these are just notes and general ideas.

This is actually a crude painting, but I found its approach quite interesting. Also, if we were going to start with a child, we wouldn't start with this painting.

It has also taken me a while to organize this text along with the photos, links, etc. I really don't have much experience with Markdown so I hope you appreciate the work : )

Today we're going to start with:

The Raft of the Medusa (Le Radeau de la Méduse) by Théodore Géricault

• Date: 1818-1819. • Author: Théodore Géricault, French painter (1791-1824), the child prodigy (and enfant terrible) of French Romanticism, painted this painting before he was 30 (he lived only 32). In it, we can once again see that awkward artist capturing a well-known negligence on the part of the French state. • Real event: Inspired by the shipwreck of the French frigate La Méduse (1816), which ran aground off the coast of Mauritania.

• The scandal was political: the captain had been appointed due to royalist favoritism, lacking the necessary experience. The painting became a fierce critique of the French Restoration government.

• Dimensions: gigantic: about 7 x 5 meters → almost the size of an entire wall, forcing the viewer to "enter" the tragedy.

• Pyramidal composition:

• Another possible division is the following:

But I like the pyramidal composition having at the base: dead and dying bodies (hopelessness).

In the center, anguish and despair

At the top: hope, represented by a man waving a cloth to ask for help, while a ship appears in the background (L’Argus).

Detail of the ship (L’Argus).

• Color palette: earthy tones, sickly greens, and a stormy sky, reinforcing the atmosphere of anguish. • Brutal realism: Géricault studied corpses in morgues to depict the rotting flesh and rigidity of the dead with absolute fidelity. • Other details:

Blue: A giant wave is approaching. More anguish upon anguish. Red: The sail is inflated; there is a strong wind, possibly due to the sea waves. Green: Hope; a new dawn is approaching, along with the ship that would be the rescue.

A man may be holding his son's corpse, his gaze is distant, it's a deep gaze, nothing else matters, his back is to the advertisement, he doesn't flinch, nothing else matters if he has lost everything.

Someone in the background no longer realizes when another joins hands in prayer that what they are announcing is true and they can be found. Also in the painting, blacks and whites come together. There are no slaves in that painting, all are survivors. There are no free men there either, they are all prisoners of that piece of wood.

• Obsessive Research: Géricault interviewed survivors and built a model of the raft in his studio. • Real Models: He used corpses and amputated limbs to practice depicting decomposition. • Hidden Self-Portrait: One of the bodies depicted on the raft is believed to be Géricault himself. • Scandal in its Time: At the Paris Salon of 1819, the work was considered "repugnant" for its crudeness and implicit political criticism. • Later Impact: Although not initially a success, the work influenced the entire Romantic movement and later artists such as Delacroix (who, in fact, posed as a model for one of the castaways).

• It is considered a masterpiece of Romanticism, for its exaltation of the sublime, the tragic, and the emotional in contrast to neoclassical coldness. • It is also a precursor to social realism, placing at the center not mythological heroes, but ordinary men abandoned by political incompetence, something we might say was new at the time. • Today it resides in the Louvre Museum and remains one of the most impressive paintings in history.

LInks: https://historia-arte.com/obras/la-balsa-de-la-medusa-de-gericault