Wallpaper, using the printmaking technique of woodcut, had arrived in Europe from China at the beginning of the fifteenth century, gaining popularity in Renaissance Europe among the emerging gentry.

The elite of society are accustomed to hanging large tapestries on the walls of their homes, a tradition from the Middle Ages.

These tapestries add color to the room as well as providing an insulating layer between the stone walls and the room, thus retaining heat in the room.

However, tapestries are extremely expensive and so only the very rich can afford them.

Less well-off members of the elite, unable to buy tapestries due either to prices or wars preventing international trade, turn to wallpaper to brighten up their rooms.

Early wallpaper features scenes similar to those depicted on tapestries, and large sheets of the paper are sometimes hung loose on the walls, in the style of tapestries, and sometimes pasted as today.

Prints are very often pasted to walls, instead of being framed and hung, and the largest sizes of prints, which come in several sheets, are probably mainly intended to be pasted to walls.

Some important artists make such pieces, notably Albrecht Dürer, who works on both large picture prints and also ornament prints intended for wall-hanging.

The largest picture print is The Triumphal Arch commissioned by the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I and completed in 1515.

This measures a colossal 3.57 by 2.95 meters, made up of 192 sheets, and is printed in a first edition of seven hundred copies, intended to be hung in palaces and, in particular, town halls, after hand-coloring.

Very few samples of the earliest repeating pattern wallpapers survive, but there are a large number of old master prints, often in engraving of repeating or repeatable decorative patterns.

These are called ornament prints and were intended as models for wallpaper makers, among other uses.