Explore the Composition of this artwork, The Massacre at Chios.
Delacroix had been greatly impressed by his fellow Parisien Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa, a painting for which he himself modeled as the young man at the front with the outstretched arm. The pyramidal arrangement that governs Géricault's painting is similarly seen with the figures in the foreground of The Massacre at Chios. On this unlikely layout of characters, Delacroix commented, "One must fill up; if it is less natural, it will be more beautiful and fécond. Would that everything should hold together!" The dense assembly of characters at the front is in marked contrast to the open and dispersed spaces behind them. Land and sea, light and shade appear as bands of drifting colours listlessly running into each other, and Delacroix appears to abandon the laws of perspective altogether with his rendering of clouds. The complete effect of this background is to suggest a constant opening out, dissolution and centrelessness. Aesthetician Heinrich Wölfflin identified this technique, and classified it a tectonic form.
The thirteen civilians—men, women and children–have been rounded up for slaughter or enslavement. They are harshly presented to the viewer in an almost flat plane; slumped, disordered, and unevenly distributed. Their arrangement principally comprises two human pyramids–one pyramid to the left of the canvas culminating in the man with the red fez, and the other to the right culminating in the mounted soldier. The area between the two pyramids contains two soldiers in shadow, and two more Greek victims–a young man embraced by a young woman. The two men in the pyramid to the left are injured. The man at the front is on or near to the point of death, and the man poised at the top of the group appears unable to prepare a defence for himself. His gaze is in the direction of the suffering children in front of him, but it does not fall on them. This seeming detachment, coupled with the vacant stare of the dying man lend to this group an air of despondent resignation.In contrast, the human pyramid to the right has a vigorous vertical thrust. The writhing of the woman tied to the horse, the upward reaching stretch of the figure to her left, the shocking mane of the horse, and the twisting and commanding figure of the soldier upon it, all give dynamism to the grouping as it rises. But at the foot of the pyramid, an old woman raises her head to gaze into the sky, and to her right a baby seeks maternal comfort from a clenched-fisted corpse. Body parts including a hand and forearm, and an indistinct, congealed bloody mass hover grimly above the infant.
Of the rear, Elisabeth A. Fraser notes that "[t]he background cuts through the centre of the composition and drops inexplicably out and back from the cluster of [foreground] figures." This dramatic arrangement breaks the picture apart into fragments, with clumps of tangled bodies, scattered glances and other details competing for the viewers attention. In the middle distance, another mêlée of humanitarian disaster unfolds, and the background is an uneven display of sacked, burning settlements and scorched earth. Most of the Mediterranean horizon is painted with bleak earth colours, and it is punctuated only by smoke, the mane of the rearing horse and the head of the soldier.
Théodore Géricault Chios Massacre right left Heinrich Wölfflin Paris The Raft of the Medusa