Publisher's Synopsis
Wheelock Whitney provides the most detailed account to date of the biographical circumstances of the Italian stay, paying particular attention to the artistic milieu in which Géricault found himself in Rome. He assesses Géricault's contact with numerous contemporary artists and in particular the nature of their influence on him-presenting him as a product of his own time and place rather than as a solitary genius. The book discusses and reproduces almost every painting and drawing done by Géricault during this period: his copies after the antique and earlier masters; his works on themes of contemporary Italian genre; the works on mythological and erotic themes; and his paramount Italian project-the series of works on the annual race of riderless horses down the Roman Corso. The book not only sheds light on a hitherto unexamined period of Géricault's life but also illuminates the efforts of a key figure in a transitional period of French art to come to grips with the classical and neoclassical past while embracing the new century's passions for the exotic and the real.