In Italy the older style of woodcuts in simple outline continued to be followed long after it was abandoned in the North. The designs in Italian books up to the year 1530, when cross-hatching was introduced, do not differ essentially in character from those of which examples have already been given. The names of the artists who produced them are either obscure or unknown, excepting Leonardo da Vinci, to whom are ascribed the cuts in Luca Pacioli’s volume, De Proportione Divina, published in 1509, and Marc Antonio Raimondi (1478-1534), to whom are ascribed the remarkably excellent cuts in a volume entitled Epistole et Evangelii Volgari Hystoriade, published in 1512 in Venice. From the first, Venice (Fig. 56) had been the chief seat of wood-engraving in Italy, and now became the rival of Lyons. The most distinguished of the group of artists who produced woodcuts in that city was Nicolo Boldrini (c. 1550), who designed several engravings (Fig. 59) after Titian (1476?-1575) with such boldness and force that some writers have believed Titian to have drawn the design on the block for Boldrini to engrave. The works of Titian and other Venetian painters were reproduced in the same way by Francesco da Nanto (c. 1530); and by other artists, like Giovanni Battista del Porto (c. 1500), Domenico delle Greche (c. 1550), and Giuseppe Scolari (c. 1580), who also sometimes made woodcuts from their own designs. Besides these engravings, some very large cuts, similar to those which the German artists had attempted, were printed from several blocks; but they have little interest. The illustrations in Vesalius’s Anatomy, published at Bâsle in 1543, in which wood-engraving was first employed as an aid to scientific exposition, were designed in Venice by Jean Calcar, a pupil of Titian, and are of extraordinary merit. Finally, in the cuts by Cesare Vecellio (1550-1606) for the volume entitled Habiti Antiche e Moderne, published in 1590, Venetian wood-engraving produced its last excellent work--so excellent, indeed, that the designs have been attributed to Titian himself, who was the uncle of Vecellio. [Illustration: FIG. 58.--The Annunciation. From a print by Francesco da Nanto.] [Illustration: FIG. 59.--Milo of Crotona. From a print by Boldrini after Titian.]