<P> The influence of Jacques - Louis David can be seen in the painting's scale, in the sculptural tautness of the figures and in the heightened manner in which a particularly significant "fruitful moment"--the first awareness of the approaching ship--is described . In 1793, David also painted an important current event with The Death of Marat . His painting had an enormous political impact during the time of the revolution in France, and it served as an important precedent for Géricault's decision to also paint a current event . David's pupil, Antoine - Jean Gros, had, like David, represented "the grandiosities of a school irredeemably associated with a lost cause", but in some major works, he had given equal prominence to Napoleon and anonymous dead or dying figures . Géricault had been particularly impressed by the 1804 painting Bonaparte Visiting the Plague - Victims of Jaffa, by Gros . </P> <P> The young Géricault had painted copies of work by Pierre - Paul Prud'hon (1758--1823), whose "thunderously tragic pictures" include his masterpiece, Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime, where oppressive darkness and the compositional base of a naked, sprawled corpse obviously influenced Géricault's painting . </P> <P> The foreground figure of the older man may be a reference to Ugolino from Dante's Inferno--a subject that Géricault had contemplated painting--and seems to borrow from a painting of Ugolini by Henry Fuseli (1741--1825) that Géricault may have known from prints . In Dante, Ugolino is guilty of cannibalism, which was one of the most sensational aspects of the days on the raft . Géricault seems to allude to this through the borrowing from Fuseli . An early study for The Raft of the Medusa in watercolour, now in the Louvre, is much more explicit, depicting a figure gnawing on the arm of a headless corpse . </P> <P> Several English and American paintings including The Death of Major Pierson by John Singleton Copley (1738--1815)--also painted within two years of the event--had established a precedent for a contemporary subject . Copley had also painted several large and heroic depictions of disasters at sea which Géricault may have known from prints: Watson and the Shark (1778), in which a black man is central to the action, and which, like The Raft of the Medusa, concentrated on the actors of the drama rather than the seascape; The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, September 1782 (1791), which was an influence on both the style and subject matter of Géricault's work; and Scene of a Shipwreck (1790s), which has a strikingly similar composition . A further important precedent for the political component was the works of Francisco Goya, particularly his The Disasters of War series of 1810--12, and his 1814 masterpiece The Third of May 1808 . Goya also produced a painting of a disaster at sea, called simply Shipwreck (date unknown), but although the sentiment is similar, the composition and style have nothing in common with The Raft of the Medusa . It is unlikely that Géricault had seen the picture . </P>

What elements or principles of art does the artist use in the raft of the medusa