Romanticism
A generation answered the confines of reason and order with feeling and imagination. Storms at sea, revolution, nightmares, the range of what a painting was allowed to hold suddenly widened. This is the source of a freedom we now take for granted: paint what you feel. The clearest way this generation made its case was size. In the academic ranking, a large canvas belonged to myth and history. Géricault put an event from three years earlier on one. On 2 July 1816 the French naval frigate Méduse ran aground off West Africa. About a hundred and fifty people were put onto a hastily built raft; thirteen days later, fifteen were alive. Starvation, thirst, and cannibalism were all reported, the cause was widely blamed on the captain's incompetence, and it became an international scandal. Géricault painted that raft at 490 by 716 centimetres — the largest scale history painting allowed — and sent it to the Salon of 1819. Not gods, but a thing that had happened to living people, hanging on the wall at the size of gods. Courbet would take the same tactic up thirty years later (see Realism). Because the ranking was decided by what you painted, the first form rebellion took was how large you painted it.