La prima[-quarta] parte de le novelle del Bandello
A 1554 Italian collection of novellas by Matteo Bandello, printed in Lucca by Vincenzo Busdraghi and Pietro Roussino for a general literary readership. The picture is a woodcut historiated initial L, a decorated capital letter with a bearded man and a seated figure inside its stem and a lion-like animal on the right. A designer could take from it the compact framed letterform and the dense, hatched black-and-white carving typical of sixteenth-century Italian printing.
![Picture 1 of 1 from La prima[-quarta] parte de le novelle del Bandello (1554), leaf 218](https://img.insideoutlibrary.com/img/200/ia-laprimaquartapar01band-218-0.webp)