Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori
A 1906 Florentine edition of Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors and architects, edited by Gaetano Milanesi and published by G. C. Sansoni, drawing on Vasari's sixteenth-century biographies of Italian artists. The two pictures are close variants of one decorative printer's device: a large initial S enclosed in an ornate frame of scrolling, leaf-like flourishes set on a plain ground. A designer could take from them a bold single-letter monogram built on a symmetrical, Art Nouveau-influenced woodcut frame.
