International Gothic

International Gothic was a courtly style of painting and manuscript illumination that spread across Western Europe from roughly 1375 to 1425, named for the way its elegant, decorative manner circulated among the courts of France, Burgundy, Bohemia and northern Italy with little regard for national boundaries. Its hallmarks are graceful, elongated figures, rich costume and courtly detail, gold backgrounds and a taste for naturalistic incidental detail, particularly animals and plants, seen at its height in the Limbourg brothers' Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry and in the work of Gentile da Fabriano. The style bridged the late Gothic and the emerging naturalism of the Early Renaissance, and its close observation of the natural world fed directly into the Netherlandish painting that followed it in the fifteenth century.