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   (hard) challenge for an artist.   (choose) suitable subjects, artists had to be well-read. Then they had to know      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     . (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     contemporary news stories. One of the first of these was The Raft of the Medusa, inspired by the wreck of      French ship in 1816, which showed how art could have a powerful political impact. It presents a scene      the survivors of the wreck on a raft littered with bodies try to signal to a distant ship. When they     ( 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      look heroic rather than violent. The picture caused a huge outcry. Some people thought the artist meant to criticize the French king,     had been involved in appointing the ship's captain.