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taken with great bloodshed. A print by Ducarme of 1828 presented “Greece sacrificed” (La Grèce immolée). An old man with a young boy clutching his knees stands before the cross. A woman, her arms wrapped around the cross, has a naked child grasping her hand, while to the side another Greek is dying, an arrow through his heart, while yet another lies already dead close by. In the background, a classical column has fallen over. Riding toward them on rearing stallions are a group of Turks, armed with bows, pistols, and a long yataghan. Behind, a standard-bearer brandishes the horsetail pennant. There is little doubt about the fate of the old man and the children. For the woman, sexual violation seems certain, as she raises her eyes to heaven. No one in Paris in 1828 who saw this print could have had any doubt as to its meaning.

These tropes appeared time and again on canvas: the cross, the heroic Greeks on foot fighting against expressionless Turks on horseback, women with children at the breast, maidens praying to the Virgin. They were just as omnipresent in the images sold on the streets of Paris as in the paintings shown in the salons and in aid of the Greek cause. They presented a strong single image of “good” fighting “evil.” Many of the themes were already familiar, from earlier paintings, such as Gros’ 1806 Battle of Aboukir, where the horsetails were reeling toward the ground as the vanquished Mamluk commander offered his scimitar to General Murat. But the mixture of pathos, Christian pride and heroism, and Ottoman arrogance was a new combination. Eugène Delacroix’s Massacre on Chios, exhibited in 1824 and then bought by Louis XVIII for the Louvre, was the quintessence of these themes. Criticized at the time for being muddled and chaotic, it drew upon Delacroix’s skill in satirical cartooning, which at that point provided his main source of income. It was not art but propaganda.61 The exhausted Christians herded together to be shipped to the capital as slaves are languidly guarded by two Turks. A cold and expressionless Ottoman, on a rearing horse, is drawing his sword to hack down a brawny Greek seeking to protect a half-naked woman. But it is in the background that the real business of conquest is taking place. Women are dragged along by their hair, others are having their clothes ripped from them, still others are pursued by lancers on horseback. In contrast to a great classical painting in the style of David, the main action is not in the center of the foreground, but in the random savageries revealed behind.

The many paintings of the fall of Missolonghi in April 1826 revealed a double theme: martyrdom and triumph. At Missolonghi the Greeks were massacred by the victorious Turks, but in their last moments they blew up their powder magazine, killing, it was claimed, more than 2,000 of the “barbarians.” After Missolonghi the image of savagery was made still more powerful and explicit. In the print of Eugène Devéria, a naked baby is about to be skewered by a Turkish sword despite its mother’s pleas, while the Turkish horses wear a string of Christian heads like a necklace.62 In another image a woman prepares to stab herself and her child rather than suffer “a fate worse than death.”63 Delacroix’s Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1826) is more subtle: the horsetail standard waves in the background, and the great city has exploded, crushing its people beneath its stones. Yet the incarnation of Greece, half kneeling on the ruins, is not cowed or fearful; she is defiant and proud.

The source materials for all these images were events as they were perceived in France. They drew on news reports, public meetings, pamphlets, poems, and even novels. But the process was circular. The images were generated from the written texts, and they both catered to popular taste and then helped to form that taste. Thereafter they became sources for further texts and images. The massacres on Chios were remembered as Delacroix or other artists such as Colin had painted them. Conversely, because the killings of the Muslims in the Peloponnese