Hellelil and Hildebrand, the Meeting on the Turret Stairs 1864

Frederick William Burton created this watercolor painting, "Hellelil and Hildebrand, the Meeting on the Turret Stairs", sometime in the mid-19th century. It depicts a clandestine meeting between a princess and her personal guard. Made in Britain, the image draws on a medieval Scandinavian ballad that tells a tragic love story. But the cultural phenomenon of the tragic medieval romance was really a product of the 19th century, not the middle ages. Burton, and many artists like him, looked to the past to reflect on the social and political issues of their own time. The pre-Raphaelites, for example, self-consciously looked back to earlier artistic traditions in an attempt to critique the industrial revolution and what they saw as the degradation of contemporary society. To understand these kinds of works, we need to look beyond the image itself, delving into the artistic and intellectual contexts in which they were made.