La Pirlonea : commedia fantastica, faceta, e ridicola
A 1680 Italian comic play, La Pirlonea, written by Lazaro Agostino Cotta and printed in Milan for a general reading public. The four pictures are small woodcut-style ornaments: a scrolling foliate border, a figure in a long cloak against a wall, a heraldic cartouche with fringed canopy and pendant finial, and a decorative initial S with a dragon-like form beside printed text. A designer could take from them the dense, hand-cut linework of seventeenth-century Italian print ornament, useful for borders, dividers and drop caps.
