ABSTRACT
Known today as ‘Ghent-Bruges strewn borders’, the margins of southern Netherlandish manuscripts contain painted flowers that look as if they have been freshly picked and scattered across the margins. This chapter sketches the developments in fifteenth-century marginal decoration, miniatures and page layout, which together led to the creation of these trompe-l’oeil borders in the first half of the 1470s. Illuminators explored the play of light and shadow; they experimented with naturalistic representations in colour as well as monochrome grisaille techniques. Although the interplay between reality and illusion was a recurring theme in all types of Flemish borders, flowers continued to dominate the margins of manuscripts until the first decades of the sixteenth century.
