Until about 150 years ago, the most important, expensive and renowned kind of painting was large-scale pictures that told a story, regarded as the 小题1: (hard) challenge for an artist. 小题2: (choose) suitable subjects, artists had to be well-read. Then they had to know 小题3: stories could be told without words, using only gestures and expressions. To create lifelike scenes, they had to understand perspective, lighting and anatomy. So history painting needed a lot of thought and 小题4: . (imagine). Large-scale pictures used to be reserved for grand religious or patriotic subjects, but that changed in the 19th century, as artists began creating history paintings based 小题5: contemporary news stories. One of the first of these was The Raft of the Medusa, inspired by the wreck of 小题6: French ship in 1816, which showed how art could have a powerful political impact. It presents a scene 小题7: the survivors of the wreck on a raft littered with bodies try to signal to a distant ship. When they 小题8: ( rescue ), they told how they had been abandoned by their captain, while he sailed to safety in a lifeboat. Starving, they had to eat each other to survive—though this picture makes 小题9: look heroic rather than violent. The picture caused a huge outcry. Some people thought the artist meant to criticize the French king, 小题10: had been involved in appointing the ship's captain.