TY - JOUR T1 - From the Museum: the Art of Thinking. Part Four: Debate JF - European Respiratory Journal JO - Eur Respir J SP - 1588 LP - 1589 DO - 10.1183/09031936.00430614 VL - 43 IS - 6 AU - Tom Kotsimbos Y1 - 2014/06/01 UR - http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/43/6/1588.abstract N2 - The Raft of the Medusa is an iconic, history-style painting of a then contemporary shipwreck (French frigate Méduse, June 17, 1816) that paradoxically helped realise the truth of the actual event despite widespread news coverage. Here, the Neoclassicism of the Enlightenment gives way to the passion filled realism of Romanticism. Classical pyramidal composition is no longer accompanied by an ideal beauty but by dark turbulence and the cruel reality of the ever-present scramble for life over piled-up corpses. Géricault's violent visual portrayal was a triumph of feeling that infused the debate regarding the shipwreck with a visceral aesthetic that dramatically widened the lens of truth through which society saw itself. Historically, post-Napoleonic France was “adrift” at the time and “the whole of society was aboard the Medusa”: from the incompetent captain to the corrupt system that had appointed him; from the lifeboats reserved for the wealthy to the poor souls left behind to fend for themselves; from the disaster of the shipwreck to the nightmare of animal brutality and cannibalism on the raft (with few survivors left to tell the tale). The painting stands as a synthetic view of human life abandoned to its fate and as such fascinated and upset the public, divided critics and generated much debate. ER -