De pictvra : praestantissima et numqvam satis laudata arte : libri tres
Leon Battista Alberti's three-book Latin treatise on painting, written in the 1430s and printed at Basel in 1540 for humanist scholars and artists reading about perspective and composition. The surviving images here are printer's ornament rather than diagrams: a woodcut device of a dolphin coiled around an upright shaft inside a strapwork cartouche, a black-ground inhabited initial S framed by columns, and aged blank leaves usable as paper textures.
