Label Text: 32Q: 2130 19th Century , written 2015 The story of the Trojan War, related in the Iliad, was a fruitful source of inspiration for Burne-Jones and his contemporaries. In 1870, Burne-Jones began to plan a multipart painting devoted to the subject. The ambitious project was never completed, but over the years BurneJones reworked many of his ideas into individual paintings and drawings. This sheet is related to Helen Captive in Burning Troy, one of his original designs for the picture. Helen, a daughter of Zeus, was renowned as the fairest woman in the world, “the face that launch’d a thousand ships.” Her abduction by the Trojan prince Paris instigated the war. Rather than being a preliminary study, the work shown here may be a later echo of the original conception. In the 1890s, Burne-Jones began to use gold paint on colored papers, inspired by medieval manuscript illustrations. He told his studio assistant that “the gold work must be done very directly—it’s an art of itself.”