La stiava : comedia
La stiava is a 1550 Italian comedy by Giovanni Maria Cecchi, printed in Venice by Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari and brothers for a reading audience of the period. Its pictures are small woodcut historiated initials, each framed block containing a scene such as figures in a landscape, a cupid with a bow, or a servant at work, and a designer might take their compact figurative vignettes as models for decorative letter-based framing.
