The Raft of the Medusa

Survivors of a shipwreck cling to a makeshift raft, some dead, some raising a scrap of cloth toward a distant ship on the horizon, in a pyramid of bodies built from real corpses Géricault studied in the morgue. It depicted a real 1816 disaster caused by an incompetent aristocratic captain, and the government scandal it dramatised made the painting explosively controversial in its own time. It is now considered a founding work of French Romanticism.