Picta poesis : vt pictvra poesis erit
Picta poesis is a 1552 emblem book by Barthélemy Aneau, printed in Lyon by Mathias Bonhomme for readers of Latin verse and learned humanist circles. Its pictures are small woodcut ornaments: a horned ram-headed cartouche with a central grotesque mask and a pair of fighting figures, and separate mask-and-scroll tailpieces with a grimacing face on a ribbon band. A designer could take from them the crisp black-line vocabulary of sixteenth-century French ornament, with its strapwork, grotesque faces and ribbon cartouches.
