Il Bernardone : comedia
A 1676 Italian comedy, Il Bernardone by Pietro Francesco Minacci, printed in Rome by Michel' Ercole for a general reading public. The picture is a small decorated initial letter N, cut as a woodblock with foliage and a small animal filling the spaces around the strokes. A designer could take from it the dense, hatched black-and-white ornament that fills a letterform and the way vegetal and animal motifs are packed into a capital.
