The cost of war: Delacroix’s ‘Greece on the ruins of Missolonghi’

In this video, art historians Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris, discuss Eugène Delacroix’s painting, ‘Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi’, an oil on canvas work, completed in 1826. The work is part of the collections of the Museum of Fine Art of Bordeaux.

Inspired by the third siege of Missolonghi by Ottoman forces in 1826, Greece is depicted as a kneeling woman who occupies the major part of the painting. She wears a traditional Greek costume, spreading her arms as a sign of grief.

Delacroix was a French Romantic artist, regarded as the leader of the French Romantic school. In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival, the painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Delacroix followed in the footsteps of Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens and the painters of the Venetian Renaissance, emphasising colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully-modelled form.

Dramatic and romantic content characterised the central themes of Delacroix’s maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic.

View the original video here.

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