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.