In Venice book-illustration appears to have begun in the office not of a printer, but of an illuminator. Quite a number of books printed by various firms during the years 1470 to 1472 have a woodcut groundwork to their illuminated borders, and in the Spencer copy of the Italian Bible (Malermi's translation), printed in 1471 by Adam of Ammergau, the six miniatures of the Creation, with which the blanks left on leaves 11 and 12 are filled, have in the same way rough woodcuts beneath their colouring.[31] The workshop in which these decorated borders and miniatures were supplied seems to have closed or given up the practice in 1473, and until Erhard Ratdolt and his partners Loslein and Maler began publishing in 1476, no more woodcuts were produced at Venice. The work of the new firm was decorative rather than pictorial, consisting mainly of the fine borders and capital letters with which they ornamented their Calendars (1476, 1477, and 1482), their _Appian, Gesta Petri Mocenici_ of Coriolanus Cepio and _De situ orbis_ of Dionysius Periegetes, all in 1477, _Arte di ben morire_ of the following year, and _Euclid_ of 1482. With the exception of the earlier Calendars, where the borders to the titlepage (the first so decorated) are of flower-vases, these consist of highly conventionalized foliage (jasmine? vine, oak, etc.) or strapwork, some of them unequalled in their own kind until William Morris combined the same skill with a much bolder and richer treatment of his material. Illustration properly so called begins with Georg Walch's edition (1479) of the _Fasciculus Temporum_, a chronological epitome by Werner Rolewinck of Cologne. This has a quaint little view of the Piazza of San Marco and other pictures, which Ratdolt, not at all handsomely, proceeded to copy the next year. In 1481 Ratdolt adorned the _Tractatus de Actionibus_ oi Baptista de Sancto Blasio with rather a graceful little figure of a woman holding the stem of a tree. In 1482 he produced an edition of the _Poeticon Astronomicon_ of Hyginus with some figures of the planets which, rude as they were, served as models for many subsequent editions. In the same year the _Oratoriae artis epitomata_ of Jacobus Publicius was ornamented with some figures including a chessboard, cut in white on black, designed to assist the memory. [Illustration: XIV. NAPLES, FRANCESCO TUPPO, 1485 AESOP. FABULA XXII., DE ATHENIENSIBUS PETENTIBUS REGEM]