Boxeurs (The Boxers)
Notice
- Numéro d’inventaire
- 1985.64.169
Pendant ce temps, chez Théodore Géricault
La vie entière1816
An affair with his uncle's wife: another reason to leave
At that time Géricault began a love affair with his uncle's wife, Alexandrine-Modeste Caruel, and feared its discovery; it was another, personal reason for his departure for Italy.
1816–1817
Naples and Rome: the shock of Michelangelo
Géricault visited Naples, drawing the landscapes and people, but spent most of his time in Rome. The frescoes of the Sistine Chapel shook him: Michelangelo's monumentality of form inspired his pen drawings, such as “Man Felling a Bull”, among the most interesting made in Rome.
autumn 1817
The book on the wreck of the Méduse reaches Géricault
In the autumn of 1817 the book “The Wreck of the Frigate Medusa” appeared, in which the eyewitnesses, the geographer-engineer Alexandre Corréard and the physician Henri Savigny, described the thirteen-day drift of the raft after the ship ran aground off the coast of Mauritania. The book reached Géricault, who saw in it the subject for the large painting he had long dreamed of.
1817–1818
Investigating the disaster: survivors, a model raft, morgues
Géricault re-created the event by studying the available materials and meeting witnesses: he got to know Corréard and Savigny, a carpenter from the Méduse made a scale model of the raft for him, and the artist modelled wax figures himself. He visited hospital morgues, drawing dead heads, emaciated bodies and severed limbs, and the preparation ended with a trip to Le Havre, where he painted studies of sea and sky.
![Ginevra de' Benci [obverse], Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1474/1478](https://api.nga.gov/iiif/8f29e3c9-a289-4d53-abf0-31a66e9e98fa/full/!2400,2400/0/default.jpg)
![Wreath of Laurel, Palm, and Juniper with a Scroll inscribed Virtutem Forma Decorat [reverse], Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1474/1478](https://api.nga.gov/iiif/ff62e8d0-45c4-498f-ad36-6358de827e04/full/!2400,2400/0/default.jpg)
