One extremely magnificent class of illumination of this date and school, specially used for _Psalters_, _Missals_ and other Service-books, has the background behind the figures formed of an unbroken sheet of burnished gold of the most sumptuously decorative effect. _Chequer backgrounds._ In the fourteenth century the plain gold background was mostly superseded by delicate diapers of lozenge and chessboard form, with alternating squares of gold and blue or red, very rich and beautiful in effect, and sometimes of extreme minuteness of scale, so that each lozenge or square of the diaper is not larger than an ordinary pin's head. In France these diapered patterns were used with great frequency, and their use survived in some cases till the early part of the fifteenth century. _Scroll patterns._ Another form of background, used in Anglo-Norman miniatures, consists of delicate scroll patterns or outlined diapers put in with a fine brush and with fluid gold over a ground of flat opaque colour. Gold scroll-work of this kind on a _pink_ ground is specially characteristic of miniatures painted in England during the fourteenth and first half of the fifteenth century. _Architectural backgrounds._ A fourth style of background, used in miniature pictures of this date, consists of architectural forms, which frequently enshrine the whole miniature, with background, frame, and canopy in one rich architectural composition. This is often painted in gold, with details in firm, dark lines, and, though conventionally treated, gives not unfrequently a representation of an exquisitely beautiful Gothic structure[112]. _Realistic backgrounds._ Last of all come the realistic backgrounds, with pictorial effects of distance and aerial perspective, often very skilful and even beautiful in effect, but not so strongly decorative or so perfectly suited to manuscript illumination as the more conventional backgrounds of an earlier date. These realistic surroundings began to be introduced in the fourteenth century, but are more especially characteristic of the fifteenth century. In the sixteenth century, when the illumination of manuscripts had ceased to be a real living art, though painfully and skilfully practised by such masters of technique as Giulio Clovio and various Italian and French painters, the pictorial character of the backgrounds was carried to an excessive degree of elaboration and decadence. _Psalter at Burlington House._