Hieronymi Cardani medici mediolanensis liber de immortalitate animorum
A 1545 Latin treatise by the Milanese physician Gerolamo Cardano on the immortality of souls, printed in Lyon by Sebastian Gryphius for scholars and physicians of the Renaissance. Its title page carries a printer's device of a winged creature on a block beside a bearded profile medallion, and its woodcut pictures are few but crisp. A designer might take the dense black letterforms of the title page and the hand-cut line of the woodcut griffin, with its feathered wings, curling tail and scaled legs, as models for engraved emblems and heraldic line work.
