Colours and Flag
The "Colours of Saint George", or St George's Cross are a white flag with a red cross, frequently borne by entities over which he is patron (e.g. the Republic of Genoa and then Liguria, England, Georgia, Catalonia, Aragon, etc.).
The cross was originally the personal flag of another saint and key Christian figure, St. Ambrose. Adopted by the city of Milan (of which he was Archbishop) at least as early as the Ninth century, its use spread over Northern Italy including Genoa. Genoa's patron saint was St. George and through the flag's use by the vast Genoese trading fleet, the association was carried throughout Europe.
The same colour scheme was used by Viktor Vasnetsov for the façade of the Tretyakov Gallery, in which some of the most famous St. George icons are exhibited and which displays St. George as the coat of arms of Moscow over its entrance.
In 1606, the flag of England (St. George's Cross), and the flag of Scotland (St. Andrew's Cross), were joined together to create the Union Flag.
Read more about this topic: Saint George
Famous quotes containing the words colours and, colours and/or flag:
“I should need
Colours and words that are unknown to man,
To paint the visionary dreariness”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“Your wits can’t thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You’ve no such colours in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming!”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“My dream is that as the years go by and the world knows more and more of America, it ... will turn to America for those moral inspirations that lie at the basis of all freedom ... that America will come into the full light of the day when all shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights, and that her flag is the flag not only of America but of humanity.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)