Millefleur designs

  

Millefleur or mille-fleurs signified as thousand flowers, a rather different style that refers to a background style of many different small flowers and plants, usually shown on a green ground, as though growing in grass. 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 in illuminated manuscripts. Many are recognizable as specific species, with varying degrees of realism, but accuracy does not seem to be the point of the depiction.

Millefleur style was most popular in late 15th and early 16th century French and Flemish tapestry.

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 mille fleur carpet made for Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy in Brussels, part of which is now in the Bern Historical Museum.

They appear to have been manufactured also in Kashmir and modern Pakistan, reflecting 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 for prayer rugs, up to about 1900.