A raft of ideas. Medusa

When pictures become enormously famous they are less and less well attended to as paintings, more and more celebrated as emblems or narratives. Immobile behind the glass walls of their reputation, Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Constable's views of Suffolk have hardened into icons. Much the same goes for Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa. Its huddle of survivors, displayed in various poses of despair or desperate hopefulness, tell a story of such notorious misery that the artist's professional achievements are always threatening to sink beneath the weight of his subject. In one sense this is fine: Géricault meant to fix the tragedy of the raft in the mind of his audience; in another sense it is a form of diminishment: art-as-such plays second fiddle to incident-as-reproach - and warning.

Having said that, the greatest strength of Medusa lies in its recreation of the actual events in 1816 on which the painting is based - events which, when they filtered back to Europe, provoked an immediate and resonant scandal. The Medusa was en route to Senegal, carrying among others the governor-designate, the (amazingly named) Julien Schmaltz, who was due to take over the colony from the British. Shortly before reaching port, she was driven on to a sandbank by her inept captain, Hugues Duroy de Chaumereys - a relic of the ancien régime - and, during the attempt to flee the wreck, a party of lifeboats set off to the shore, towing an improvised raft that carried 147 survivors. In the ensuing panic and selfishness, the rope attached to the raft was deliberately cut, leaving the raft and its crew to their fate. After several days adrift, during which bad weather, rioting, murder, thirst and hunger did for all but 15 of those on board, it was eventually sighted by one of the Medusa's companion ships, the Argus. The death toll itself was bad enough, but when the survivors began telling their stories - of gross incompetence by senior officers, of infighting and even cannibalism - the episode was quickly reinterpreted as more than just a hideous accident. It was a means of indicting the Bourbon government as a whole and of investigating the baseline of human behaviour.

Andrew Motion's In the Blood: A Memoir of My Childhood is published by Faber

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/apr/14/art

Exercises:

1. Answer the following questions:

1) Who is the artist of this picture?

2) What is happening in the picture?

3) What kind of emotions does it evoke?

2. Explain the meaning of the words and phrases:

astern, ship of state running aground, monkey-up-a-stick, a drop in the ocean, the frigate…give a heel.

3. Translate into English:

1) Было также найдено тридцать зубчиков чеснока, из чего возникли дальнейшие споры. 2) Именно с этого дня все научились потреблять человеческую плоть. 3) На седьмой день двое солдат спрятались за последним бочонком вина. 4) От радости они впадали в уныние и печаль; они завидовали судьбе тех, кто умер до них. 5) Как и их предшественники, они были лишены весел и навигационного оборудования. 6) Он писал до тех пор, пока был свет… 7) Возможно, решение было чисто эстетическим - художник предпочел искореженные тела проклятых еще одному послушному изображению еще одного деревянного Ковчега.