Altile : tragedia
A 1626 Italian tragedy printed in Padua by Gasparo Criuellari, written by Antonio Buzzacarini, held by the Getty Research Institute. The pictures are small black woodcut printers' ornaments: a repeating horizontal frieze of scrolls and foliage, and a vase of flowers with curling handles and a lower scroll base. A designer could take from them the dense, symmetrical scroll rhythm of early seventeenth-century Italian border ornament and the bold contrast of solid black forms cut into hatched shading.
