Some very fine manuscript illuminations of the highly pictorial type were executed for King René of Anjou, who died in 1480. Fig. 26 shows a good example of this, with a carefully painted landscape background, one of sixteen fine miniatures in a manuscript of the _Roman de la très douce Mercy du Cueur damour épris_, one of the poetical and allegorical romances which were then so popular in France. This miniature represents the meeting of the Knight _Humble Requeste_ with the Squire _Vif Désir_. This manuscript is now at Vienna, in the Imperial library, No. 2597. _Beauty of fruit and flowers._ The illuminated borders are also not unfrequently of very great merit and high decorative value; they are formed of rich and fanciful combinations of various plants and flowers, treated at first with just the due amount of conventionalism, but tending, towards the end of the fifteenth century, to an excessive and too pictorial realism. As late as the middle of the fifteenth century the "ivy pattern" of the previous century survived with little modification, and very beautiful borders occur with branches of the vine, the oak, the maple and other trees, together with a great variety of flowers, such as the rose, the daisy, the columbine, the clove-pink or carnation, the pansy, the lily, the iris or blue flag, the cornflower, the anemone, the violet, the thistle; and with many kinds of fruit, especially the grape, the strawberry, the pomegranate and the mulberry. Among this wealth of fruit and foliage, variety is given by the introduction of birds, insects, animals, and grotesque monsters half beast and half human, or else living figures growing out of flower blossoms, all designed with much graceful fancy and decorative beauty. _Later style._ _Imitation of relief._ Towards the close of the fifteenth century one skilfully treated but less meritorious style of illuminated border became very common in France and Flanders. This consisted of isolated objects, such as sprigs of various kinds of flowers and fruits, especially strawberries, together with butterflies and other insects, shells, reptiles and the like scattered over the margin of the page, very frequently on a background of dull fluid gold[143]. A deceptive effect of relief is commonly attempted by the painting of strong shadows, as if each object were lying on the gold ground and casting its shadow on the flat surface. This attempt at relief of course marks a great decadence of taste, and yet it occurs in manuscripts which show much artistic feeling and great technical skill; as, for example, in the magnificent Grimani _Breviary_, mentioned below at p. 167, see fig. 38. _Use of fluid gold._ In French and Flemish miniatures of this period, gold, applied with a brush, is often used to touch in the high lights, not only in the _grisaille_ miniatures, but also in paintings with brilliant pigments, much in the same way as in the Umbrian and Florentine pictures of contemporary date.