The Massacre at Chios

Eugène Delacroix finished The Massacre at Chios in 1824. It was only the second major oil painting of his career, and it is enormous: oil paint on canvas, 419 centimetres (13 ft 9 in) high and 354 centimetres (11 ft 7 in) wide. It hangs today in Room 700 of the Department of Paintings at the Louvre in Paris, catalogued under the inventory number INV 3823.

The event behind it was recent. In 1822, two years before the paint dried, the island of Chios, in the northern Aegean Sea, was devastated during the Greek war against Ottoman rule. Civilians were killed or taken into slavery, and the life of the island was wrecked. When Delacroix took up the subject, it was news, not history.

To see what he did, it helps to know what a painter in his position was expected to do. A canvas of this size announced itself as a history painting — the grand, large-format genre that took its subjects from real events and stood at the top of the official ranking of kinds of painting. History painting had a settled habit for scenes of disaster: build the composition around one commanding figure — a defender, a martyr, a leader — so that the eye finds that person first, and the deaths around them read as the price of something. The hero gives the horror a shape, and gives the viewer a place to stand.

Delacroix left that figure out. He arranged the victims instead as a frieze — a band of figures spread across the canvas at roughly the same depth, like the carved strip of figures that runs along the top of a classical temple. Men, women and children sit, slump and lie across the foreground: exhausted, grieving, sick, terrified or dead. The consequence is mechanical, and you can test it in front of the painting. Because no single figure gathers the eye, the eye travels along the row of bodies, reaches the edge of the canvas, and comes back. There is no climax to arrive at, so looking becomes a kind of counting.

The care in the painting works against comfort rather than for it. The costumes are ornate, coloured and particular, and that particularity makes the damage specific: these are individuals, not emblems of suffering in general. Behind and above them, the ground opens into a wide stretch of smoke, scattered figures and ruined land under a heavy sky. In an older composition this upper half is where relief would come — a temple, a banner, a break of light. Here it repeats the message of the lower half instead. The land is as emptied as the people.

One figure does have force: the armed rider at the right. His horse turns, his back is straight, his costume takes the light. The victims near him are painted in a lower key — duller flesh, heavier postures, faces emptied of will. So the most alive thing on the canvas is a man on the side doing the killing.

That imbalance was noticed at once. The painting was completed and shown at the Salon of 1824 — the state exhibition in Paris where new French painting was judged in public — and the contrast between the vigour given to the aggressor and the dismal handling of the victims has drawn comment since the work was first hung. Some critics have charged that Delacroix might have tried to show some sympathy with the brutal occupiers. Here the record simply stops. No document tells us what Delacroix meant by the contrast, and the canvas will not settle the question on its own: the same passages can be read as accusation, as fascination, or as plain observation of where power sat. What can be said is narrower and firmer. He declined the convention of balancing an atrocity with a figure who redeems it. Even his French title keeps the subject plural and open — Scènes des massacres de Scio, scenes from the massacres of Chios — rather than naming one deed or one victim.

Scale does the rest of the work. A canvas 419 centimetres (13 ft 9 in) high cannot be taken in at a glance or passed in a corridor; it fills your field of view. Stand in front of it and your eyes fall at roughly the height of the seated and the fallen, so you are placed among them, not lifted above them. Colour and costume pull you along the frieze; the empty middle distance gives you nowhere to rest. The painting builds its effect by accumulation, not by climax.

It belongs to Romanticism, the movement usually described by its appetite for scale, colour and strong feeling, and this picture has all three. What it withholds is the consolation that usually came with them. There is little in the ruin to suggest hope or recovery, and Delacroix, near the start of his career, chose to leave it that way.