However good the large illustrations in Venetian books, the merits of them are rather those of single prints than of really appropriate bookwork. The little column-cuts, on the other hand, are almost playful in their minuteness, and even when most successful produce the effect of a delightful border or tailpiece without quite attaining to the full possibilities of book-illustration. The feverish production of these column-cuts began to slacken, though it did not cease, in 1493, and about that date a few charming full-page pictures are found at the beginning and end of various small quartos. From the treatment of the man's hair and beard it is clear that the delightful frontispiece to the _Fioretti della Biblia_ of 1493 (Prince d'Essling, I, 161) was the work of the illustrator of the second Malermi Bible from which the small cuts in the text are taken. The three cuts to the _Fioretti_ of S. Francis, completed 11 June in the same year, that of the _Chome l'angelo amaestra l'anima_ of Pietro Damiani, dated in the following November, of an undated _Monte de la Oratione,_ and again of the _De la confessione_ of S. Bernardino of Siena, all in the same style, form a group of singular beauty (see Prince d'Essling, I, 284 _sqq._; II, 191, 194, 195). Those of S. Catherine's _Dialogo de la divina providentia_, 17 May, 1494 (D'Essling, II, 199 _sqq._), were probably no less happily designed, but have lost more in their cutting, and with these must be grouped the picture of a Venetian school in the _Regulae Sypontinae_ of Nicolaus Perottus, 29 March, 1492 (D'Essling, II, 86), used also in the _De Structura Compositionis_ of Nicolaus Ferettus, printed three years later at Forli. The style is continued in the _Specchio della fede_ of Robertus Caracciolus, 11 April, 1495 (D'Essling, II, 260), in the headpiece of the _Commentaria in libros Aristotelis_ of S. Thomas Aquinas, 28 Sept., 1496, and in the two admirable pictures of Terence lecturing to his commentators, and of a theatre as seen from the back of the stage, found in the _Terentius cum tribus commentariis_ of July, 1497 (D'Essling, II, 295, and 277 _sqq._). Still in the same style, but carelessly designed and poorly cut, are the illustrations to the well-known Ovid of April, 1497 (D'Essling, III, 220 _sqq._), and this leads us on to the still more famous _Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_ of Francesco Colonna, printed by Aldus for Leonardo Crassus, a jurisconsult, in December, 1499, and finally to the cut of Christ entering Jerusalem in the _Devote Meditatione_ of the following April (D'Essling, I, 372), where the hand of the artist of the _Hypnerotomachia_ is clearly visible, though he has surrounded his picture with a frame in the Florentine manner, which was then beginning to make its influence felt at Venice.