Il lanzi : comedia
Il lanzi is a comedy printed in Florence in 1566 by Valente Panizza and Marco Peri, with Francesco Mercati as author and Alessandro Ceccherelli as bookseller. The pictures are small woodcut historiated initials set in square frames, including a large letter N with a figure and a C enclosing a reclining figure, plus an A with a landscape. A designer might take from them the compact, figurative letterform style of sixteenth-century Italian print, where the image sits inside the letter.
