Take a close look at the soft petals and delicate structure of an iris. Examine the bold perfection of a sunflower’s disk. Flowers are among nature’s most amazing and beautiful works of art. Perhaps that’s why flowers have inspired artists through the ages. In almost every culture and at most every point in history, artists have captured the beauty and the magic of flowers. Their paintings have enriched the lives of people all over the world. Artists haven’t always portrayed plats exactly as they are in nature. The ancient Greeks made naturalistic or true-to-life, drawings of plants. They took this style to Asia Minor, where it continued.
But the naturalistic style didn’t survive in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. European artists continued the portray flowers, but they did so in a different way. In Europe during the middle Ages, stylized pictures of the plants and flowers often filled the borders of illuminated manuscripts-hand-lettered books were Bibles and prayer books.