Della historia vinitiana di M. Pietro Bembo card. volgarmente scritta. Libri XII
A 1552 Venetian printing of Pietro Bembo's history of Venice in the vernacular, issued for a literate Italian readership, with decorative woodcut initials. The four pictures are all historiated initials: three show a bearded man in a cloud-bank wrestling with or riding a winged creature in a large capital I, and one shows two nude figures beside a tree inside a capital M. A designer could draw on their dense hatching and cloud forms for engraved or emblematic motifs.
