Dr. James Jackson
RE: http://jcccnet.johnco.cc.ks.us/~jjackson/fallacies.html
Dear Dr. Jackson:
I congratulate you on the syllabi and other materials you have posted on your web site. I found them to be both interesting and informative and I sincerely enjoyed perusing through them. Nevertheless, I must bring an important error to your attention which was found on your "fallacies" html.
Your discussion of Delacroix's "The Massacre at Chios[: Greek families awaiting death or slavery]" described it as a painting of the massacre of a Greek village. Unfortunately, "The Massacre at Chios" was actually a painting of a nightmarish tragedy of far greater proportions: Delacroix's masterpiece portrays the extermination of the entire island of Chios. Roughly 50,000 Greeks were slaughtered and tens of thousands more sold into "white slavery" by the Turks (refer to Hiram Powers' celebrated Romanticist statue, "The Greek Slave", 1847)--as Lord Byron had depicted in his own poems and other works, the Chios massacre was just one of many such large scale atrocities inflicted upon the Greek population during the Greek War of Independence. Described by Jean Cau as the Guernica of the nineteenth century, the painting's evocation of the epic scale of this holocaust was one of its most important qualities distinguishing it as a crowning masterpiece of the Romantic movement.
I greatly look forward to viewing this important correction on your site and I wish you continued success on your ambitious project. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me.
Sincerely,
P. D. Spyropoulos, Esq.
Director