Until about 150 years ago, the most important, expensive and renowned kind of painting was

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.hardest