The Exodus from Missolonghi

On the night of 10 April 1826, after a year of siege and with the food gone, the people shut inside Missolonghi tried to break out through the Ottoman and Egyptian lines. About 10,500 were in the town. Roughly 1,500 got through. Vryzakis painted the scene 27 years later, and he painted it as a martyrdom. The lower half is the sortie, fighters crossing a wooden bridge with the flag raised over them, the dead and the wounded in the ditch beneath, Ottoman soldiers already climbing ladders at the right. The upper half is his own invention, Christ enthroned in a golden cloud, angels holding out palms and wreaths.

He painted this subject three times. The canvas owned by the University of Athens was lent to Missolonghi for the centenary in 1926 and burned there, together with the town's own version, in the fire of 1929. The one hanging here was tracked down much later at the Greek embassy in Rome. By then the composition had been familiar for generations as a print, lithographed in Paris in 1856.