Blood Angels Marching Beneath a Skull Banner — Print & Oil Painting

The highest object in this tall canvas is a human skull cast in gold, mounted on a short staff and held up at arm's length, with a pale banner hanging from a crossbar beside it and a small bronze eagle on the pole above. Everything else in the picture sits below that skull and is arranged, deliberately, so that the eye climbs to it.

Beneath it march warriors in deep red plate with gold rims a hand's breadth wide. The pauldrons carry a red teardrop with a white wing curling off it, repeated on shoulder after shoulder as the group recedes. Two of them are bare-headed with long fair hair blowing loose across the collar; the nearest carries a heavy boxed gauntlet in one fist and a long haft across the body, and parchment ribbons hang from every joint.

The ground is the part the artist wants you to find late. It is littered from edge to edge: a fallen figure face up with the mouth open, dark spiked armour, a broken standard, and a pale eight-pointed star lying flat in the dirt where the pole came down. The squad is walking across all of it without a single head turned downward.

Light comes from one place only, a thin orange line on the horizon at the right where something is burning, and it catches the top surface of every gold rim on the way in. Above that, a bright streak crosses the upper right corner at speed. The rest of the canvas is violet-brown haze with no detail in it whatsoever.

The Blood Angels are the artists of the Adeptus Astartes, and their armourers are famous for it. Where another Chapter stamps a number on a plate, this one has it chased, gilded and hung with reliquaries, and a standard like the one in this picture is repaired for centuries rather than replaced. It belongs to our Warhammer 40.000 collection, next to a brother of the same Chapter standing amid smoke and embers and the winged primarch they take their name from.