Poesie toscane
Poesie toscane is a 1637 Italian poetry collection printed in Rome at the Apostolic Camera press, its verses attributed to Pope Urban VIII and its decorative pieces linked to the engraver Stefano Della Bella. The four pictures here are small woodcut-style ornaments: a pair of bees or wasps with fused heads, and two symmetrical scrolled cartouches with flowers and a central bow. A designer could take from them the tight symmetry of mirrored insect forms and the curling acanthus-like scrollwork of seventeenth-century Roman border ornament.
