Il libro del cortegiano
Il libro del cortegiano is Baldassarre Castiglione's 1528 Venetian printed treatise on courtly manners, issued from the Aldine press and aimed at educated courtiers and readers of Italian. The single picture is the Aldine dolphin-and-anchor device, a woodcut printer's mark showing a dolphin coiled around an anchor with the letters AL and DVS flanking the shaft. A designer might take from it the compact logic of a printer's emblem, where an animal and a tool combine into a memorable, symmetrical mark within a plain ruled border.
