Millefleur

The Triumph of Death, or the Three Fates,Flemishtapestry with a typical mille-fleurs background,c. 1510–1520

The birds and animals at inconsistent scales are a feature of the style

Millefleur,millefleursormille-fleur(Frenchmille-fleurs,literally "thousand flowers" ) refers to a background style of many different small flowers and plants, usually shown on a green ground, as though growing in grass. It is essentially restricted to Europeantapestryduring the lateMiddle Agesand earlyRenaissance,from about 1400 to 1550, but mainly about 1480–1520. The style had a notable revival byMorris & Co.in 19th century England, being used on original tapestry designs, as well as illustrations from hisKelmscott Presspublications. The millefleur style differs from many other styles of floral decoration, such as thearabesque,in that many different sorts of individual plants are shown, and there is no regular pattern. The plants fill the field without connecting or significantly overlapping. In that it also differs from the plant and floral decoration of Gothic page borders inilluminated manuscripts.

There is also a rather different style known as millefleur in Indian carpets from about 1650 to 1800.

In the 15th century, an elaborate glass making technique was developed. SeeMillefiori,Murano glassand other glassmakers make pieces, particularlypaper weights,that use the motif.

Tapestries

In the millefleur style the plants are dispersed across the field on a green background representing grass, to give the impression of a flowery meadow, and cover evenly the whole decorated field. At the time they were calledverduresin French. They are mostly flowering plants shown as a whole, and in flower, with the coloration of the flowers of a distinct brightness compared to the usually darker background. Many are recognizable as specific species, with varying degrees of realism, but accuracy does not seem to be the point of the depiction. Neither are the flowering plants used to create perspective or depth of field. There are very often animals and sometimes human figures dispersed around the field, often rather small in relation to the plants, and at a similar size to each other, whatever their relative sizes in reality.

The tapestries usually include large figures whose meaning is not always apparent, which seems to derive from the division of labour under theguildsystem, so that the weavers were obliged to repeat figure designs by members of thepainters' guild,but could design the backgrounds themselves. Such was the case in Brussels at any rate, after a lawsuit between the two groups in 1476.The subjects are generally secular, but there are some religious survivals.

Millefleur style was most popular in late 15th and early 16th century French andFlemishtapestry,with the best known examples includingThe Lady and the UnicornandThe Hunt of the Unicorn.These are from what has been called the "classic" period, where each "bouquet" or plant is individually designed, improvised by the weavers as they worked, while later tapestries, probably mostly made inBrussels,usually have mirror images of plants on the right and left sides of the piece, suggesting acartoonre-used twice. The precise origin of the pieces has been much argued about, but the only surviving example whose original payment can be traced was a large heraldic millefleur carpet made for DukeCharles the Boldof Burgundy in Brussels, part of which is now in theBern Historical Museum.

The beginnings of the style may be seen in earlier tapestries. The famousApocalypse Tapestryseries (Paris, 1377–82) has several backgrounds covered in vegetal motifs, but these are springing from tendrils in the way of illuminated manuscript borders. In fact most of the very large sets do not fully use the style, with the meadow of flowers extending right to the top of the picture space. The earlyDevonshire Hunting Tapestries(1420s) have naturalistic landscape backgrounds, seen from a somewhat elevated viewpoint, so that the lower two-thirds or so of each scene has a millefleur background, but this gives way to forest or sea and sky at the top of the tapestry.The Justice of Trajan and Herkinbald(about 1450) and most ofThe Hunt of the Unicornset (about 1500) are similar. From the main period, each tapestry inThe Lady and the Unicornset has three distinct zones of millefleur background: the island containing the figures, where the plants are densely arranged, an upper background zone where they are arranged in vertical bands, and accompany animals at very varied scales, and a lower zone where a single row of plants have slight gaps between them.

During the 1800s, the millefleur style was revived and incorporated into numerous tapestry designs byMorris & Co.The company'sPomona(1885) andThe Achievement of the Grail(1895–96) tapestries demonstrate an adherence to the medieval millefleur style. Other tapestries such as theirThe Adoration of the Magi(1890) andThe Failure of Sir Gawain(c. 1890s) use the style more liberally, borrowing the flowers' often flat, splayed appearance, but overlapping them and using them as part of a landscape and not as a purely decorative backdrop.The Adoration of the Magiwas one of the company's most popular designs, with ten versions woven between 1890 and 1907.

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  À mon seul désir,from the setThe Lady and the Unicorn,late 15th century
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  15th-century tapestry
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  Detail of one of the setThe Lady and the Unicorn
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  Millefleurs in a heraldic tapestry for theBishop of Salzburg,after 1519
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  The Adoration of the Magiwoven byMorris & Coin the late 1800s.

Indian carpets

The term is also used to describe north Indian carpets, originally of the late Mughal era in the late 17th and 18th century. However these have large numbers of small flowers in repeating units, often either springing unrealistically from long-ranging twisting stems, or arranged geometrically in repeating bunches or clusters. In this they are essentially different from the irregularly arranged whole plant style of European tapestries, and closer to arabesque styles. The flowers springing from the same stem may be of completely different colours and types. There are two broad groups, one directional and more likely to show whole plants (an early version is the upper illustration), and one not directional and often just showing stems and flowers.

They appear to have been manufactured inKashmirand present-dayPakistan.They reflect a combination of European influences and underlying Persian-Mughal decorative tradition, and a trend for smaller elements in designs.The style, or styles, were later adopted by Persian weavers, especially forprayer rugs,up to about 1900.

Millefioridecoration uses theItalianversion of the same word, but is a different style, restricted to glass.

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  India, Fragment of a Saf Carpet, an early example rather closer to the tapestry style
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  Millefleur 'Star-Lattice' carpet, 17th–early 18th century Mughal India,Christie's

Other appearances

Sir Edward Burne-Jones' frontispiece toThe Wood Beyond the World(Kelmscott Press, 1894)

The millefleur style is sometimes used liberally inSir Edward Burne-Jones'illustrations for theKelmscott Presspublications, such in as his frontispiece toThe Wood Beyond the World(1894).

Millefleur are used in artistLeon Coward's muralThe Happy Garden of Lifewhich appeared in the 2016 sci-fi movie2BR02B: To Be or Naught to Be.The flowers in the mural were adapted and redesigned from those inThe Unicorn in CaptivityfromThe Hunt of the Unicorntapestry series, as part of the mural's religious allusions.

See also

• Millefiori

References

• Souchal, Geneviève (ed.),Masterpieces of Tapestry from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century: An Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,1974, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.), Galeries nationales du Grand Palais (France),ISBN0870990861,9780870990861,google books
• Walker, Daniel (1997).Flowers underfoot: Indian carpets of the Mughal era.New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Further reading

• Cavallo, Adolph S.,Medieval Tapestries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,1993, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.),ISBN0870996444,9780870996443

External links

• Carpet in the Ashmolean museum