Eugène Delacroix - Greece on the Ruins of Messolonghi(1826)

TRIBUTE TO THE GREEK INDEPENDENCE REVOLUTION OF 1821

Oil on canvas, 209 x 147 cm
Musee' des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux

After The Massacre at Chios, Greece made a second appearance in Delacroix's work in 1827. Its symbol was a young woman in national costume standing on a block of stone from which there emerges the hand of a dead insurgent. Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi elicited an immediate response from Baudelaire: "The audacity of Michelangelo and the fecundity of Rubens." Others disagreed; they would have preferred Delacroix to be less "exuberant".