ABSTRACT
For over 500,000 years plants have been used as materials with which to paint. Vegetal colourings were used for the decoration of manuscripts. Many illuminated books have been preserved in collections all over the world, where they are studied in various ways: technical, art-historical, text-historical, etcetera. Thanks to age-old recipe books, technical research such as infrared reflectography and Raman spectroscopy, the execution of historically accurate reconstructions and thorough art historical research it is possible to reveal, step by step, the secrets of the medieval illuminator and painter. In this way we are able to gain even more insight into the manner in which medieval people gave colour to life through the use of flowers and plants.
