Cucendo lo stendardo

Edmund Blair Leighton painted this in 1911, in the last quiet years before the First World War, when his brand of medieval romance still had a wide audience. He was one of the last serious painters keeping the Pre-Raphaelite taste for the Middle Ages alive, decades after the movement that started it. A young woman sits on the sunlit battlements of a castle, needle in hand, finishing a banner spread across her lap. Everything is calm and bright. She has carried her work out into the light, away from whatever is happening inside the walls. Leighton was known for exactly this: carefully researched costume and armour, a moment of quiet ceremony rather than battle. The standard across her knees carries a black eagle on a field of gold, heraldry of the kind he copied from period sources rather than invented.