The breath caught before the massacre at chios: When 19th-century restorers nearly killed a masterpiece

Nearly two centuries later, this painting still haunts the Louvre’s galleries. But what few visitors know is that the work they admire today is no longer quite the one Delacroix painted. In the hands of overzealous 19th-century restorers, The Massacre at Chios suffered what modern conservators euphemistically call “unfortunate interventions.” In reality, it was a full-blown mutilation that nearly erased the revolutionary power of the canvas forever. How could a masterpiece designed to shock, move, and revolt have been so disfigured? And what remains today of Delacroix’s original brilliance?

01The boldness of a young painter confronting history

When Delacroix set his brush to this enormous canvas in 1824, he was only 26. The young man, still unknown to the public, had experienced an artistic revelation two years earlier before Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. That painting, depicting shipwrecked survivors reduced to cannibalism, had shattered the conventions of history painting. Delacroix understood then that a work could be both a political manifesto and an explosion of color and emotion.

The subject he chose was searingly topical. In April 1822, Ottoman troops had slaughtered nearly 25,000 Greeks on the island of Chios, enslaving the survivors. All of Europe was outraged. Lord Byron died at Missolonghi in 1824 fighting for Greek independence. Delacroix, who had never set foot in Greece, decided to transform this tragedy into a painting. But unlike neoclassical artists like David, who depicted ancient heroes in idealized poses, he chose to show raw horror, unvarnished.

The result was a canvas that breathed suffering. The bodies were not arranged with elegance, as in academic compositions. They were heaped, overlapping, in a chaos that evoked panic and death. The colors themselves seemed to scream: the reds of the Turkish uniforms clashed with the ochres of the victims, while the sky—a blue so intense it was almost violent—contrasted with the scene’s darkness. Delacroix wasn’t trying to please. He wanted to provoke, to move, to make people react.

02The scandal of a painting that refused to be beautiful

When The Massacre at Chios was unveiled at the 1824 Salon, the reaction was immediate and violent. Conservative critics, accustomed to heroic scenes and balanced compositions, were horrified. Adolphe Thiers, future president of the Republic, wrote that the canvas resembled “a butcher’s shop.” For defenders of academic art, it was an insult to painting. Where was the hero? Where was the beauty? Where was the morality?

Delacroix, for his part, stood by his choice. In his notebooks, he wrote: “I did not paint a massacre; I painted grief.” And it was precisely this grief that unsettled. By refusing to depict a glorious moment in history, by showing victims rather than victors, he broke a taboo. For the first time, a history painting did not celebrate power but denounced its crimes.

The painting even divided the Romantics. Some, like Stendhal, saw it as a revolution. Others, like Ingres, loathed it viscerally. The latter, champion of neoclassicism, would never forgive Delacroix for daring to paint a contemporary subject with such freedom. The two men would clash for decades, embodying two opposing visions of art that still stand today: idealization versus truth, beauty versus emotion.

03The clumsy hands that tried to “save” the painting

If the 1824 scandal nearly buried Delacroix’s career, it was paradoxically posterity that inflicted the worst outrages on his masterpiece. In the 19th century, restoration techniques were still in their infancy. Conservators, convinced they were doing the right thing, applied methods that would horrify us today.

The first major “intervention” took place in the 1840s. At the time, it was firmly believed that great paintings needed regular cleaning to restore their original brilliance. Restorers used aggressive solvents like alcohol or turpentine, which dissolved not only dirt but also layers of varnish—and sometimes even the paint itself. In the case of The Massacre at Chios, these repeated cleanings literally washed away the delicate glazes Delacroix had applied to soften transitions between colors.

Worse still, some restorers didn’t hesitate to repaint parts of the canvas they deemed damaged. Over the decades, clumsy hands added touches of color here and there, believing they were “correcting” the work. The sky, originally a deep, vibrant blue, was covered with a layer of paint that rendered it dull and uniform. The victims’ faces, once expressive, lost their nuances. The ethnographic precision of the Turkish costumes was blurred.

The height of absurdity came in 1880, when a restorer decided to “freshen up” the entire painting. Without regard for Delacroix’s technique, he applied a thick, yellowish varnish that would gradually darken the canvas. For over a century, Louvre visitors admired a disfigured version of The Massacre at Chios, unaware that the original had been far more radiant.

04What X-rays revealed

It wasn’t until the 21st century that The Massacre at Chios’s secrets were finally uncovered. In 2020, a team of Louvre conservators undertook a meticulous restoration, aided by the latest technology. X-rays and infrared analyses revealed the full extent of the damage.

Beneath the layers of 19th-century paint, experts discovered details no one had seen in decades. The sky, for example, had been far brighter than anyone realized. Delacroix had used intense, almost electric blues to create a striking contrast with the scene’s horror. The victims’ faces, now nearly indistinct, had once been devastatingly expressive. Some details, like the folds of clothing or the reflections on weapons, had been completely erased.

But the most shocking revelation concerned a part of the painting that had been altered from the start. The analyses showed that Delacroix had initially painted an even more violent scene: a Turkish soldier raping a Greek woman. Under pressure from critics—or perhaps fearing censorship—he eventually covered this section to soften the scandal. Today, traces of this first version remain beneath the paint, a silent testament to the violence the artist ultimately chose to suggest rather than show.

05The resurrection of a masterpiece

The 2020–2021 restoration was painstaking work. For months, conservators used lasers to remove layers of yellowed varnish without damaging the original paint. They then applied a modern, reversible varnish that protects the canvas while allowing for future interventions.

The result was spectacular. For the first time in over a century, Louvre visitors could see The Massacre at Chios as Delacroix had conceived it. The colors had regained their brilliance. The blue sky, freed from its layers of superfluous paint, illuminated the scene once more. The details of the Turkish costumes, once blurred, reappeared with near-photographic precision.

But this restoration also raised troubling questions. How far should one go to “save” a work? Should everything be restored, at the risk of losing the authenticity of later interventions? In the case of The Massacre at Chios, conservators chose to preserve some traces of the 19th-century restorations, like scars that tell the painting’s story. After all, these “wounds” are part of its identity, just as much as Delacroix’s brushstrokes.

06The legacy of a painting that refuses to be silent

Today, The Massacre at Chios is no longer just a work of art. It is a symbol. A symbol of painting’s power to denounce injustice. A symbol of masterpieces’ fragility, at the mercy of the hands that touch them. And above all, a symbol of art’s resilience, capable of surviving its own disfigurements.

Looking at this canvas, one can’t help but think of all the other paintings that have suffered the same fate. How many masterpieces in the Louvre, the Hermitage, or the Prado bear the scars of clumsy restorations? How many times have well-intentioned hands, unknowingly, erased an artist’s genius?

Delacroix, for his part, would probably not have been surprised. In his notebooks, he wrote: “Paintings are like men. They age, they fade, they die.” But he also added: “Yet something in them always survives.” In the case of The Massacre at Chios, that something is the raw emotion, intact, that continues to strike visitors like a punch. Despite the centuries, despite the restorers, despite time.

And perhaps that is Delacroix’s greatest victory: to have created a work so powerful that no human clumsiness can ever truly destroy it.