Millefleur, millefleurs or mille-fleur (French mille-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 European tapestry during the late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, from about 1400 to 1550, but mainly about 1480-1520. It differs from many other styles of floral decoration, such as the arabesque, in that many different sorts of individual plants are shown, and there is no regular pattern.
Note: There is also a rather different style known as millefleur in Indian carpets from about 1650 to 1800.
Millefleur style was most popular in late 15th and early 16th century French and Flemish tapestry, with the best known examples including The Lady and the Unicorn and The 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 in Brussels, usually have mirror images of plants on the right and left sides of the piece, suggesting a cartoon re-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 Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy in Brussels, part of which is now in the Bern Historical Museum.
The beginnings of the style may be seen in earlier tapestries. The famous Apocalypse Tapestry series (Paris, 1377-82) has several backgrounds covered in vegetal motifs, but these are springing from tendrils in the way of shined 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 early Devonshire 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 The Justice of Trajan and Herkinbald (about 1450) and most of The Hunt of the Unicorn set (about 1500) are similar. From the main period, each tapestry in the The Lady and the Unicorn set 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.
Source : Wikipedia.com
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