Il padre afflitto
Il padre afflitto is a late sixteenth-century Italian prose text printed in Macerata in 1578 by Sebastiano Martellini, with Alessandro Centio named as author. The pictures are not illustrations but printers' decorative initial letters: square woodcut blocks of interlaced scrolls, leaves and grotesque masks framing a single letter, set beside the opening lines of text. A designer might take from them the模式 of a framed capital letter surrounded by dense foliate ornament, a common device for ornamented drop caps.
