La mandragola : comedia
La mandragola is a 1554 Venetian printed comedy by Niccolò Machiavelli, published by Plinio Pietrasanta and edited by Girolamo Ruscelli for a literary readership. Its historiated initials are small woodcut letters, each framed and filled with figures, animals and landscape, and a designer could borrow their compact framed-letter format, dense hatching and Renaissance figure poses for decorative capitals.
