At no other Italian town was there any outburst of book-illustration at all comparable to those at Venice and Florence in the last decade of the fifteenth century. At Ferrara, after a fine cut of S. George and a much ruder one of S. Maurelius in a _Legenda_ of the latter saint printed in 1489,[36] no illustration appeared until 1493, when the _Compilatio_ of Alfraganus was adorned with a picture of the astronomer instructing a diminutive hermit. After this, in 1496 we have a fine cut of the Virgin and Child in the _De ingenuis adolescentium moribus_, and in 1497 two important folio books, both from the press of Lorenzo Rossi, the _De claris mulieribus_ of Jacobus Philippus Bergomensis (29 April) and the Epistles of S. Jerome (12 October). The former of these is distinctly native work, with the exception of an architectural border, decorated chiefly with _putti_ and griffins, etc., which is thoroughly Venetian in style, and was used again in the S. Jerome. There are two large illustrations, one showing the author presenting his book to the Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, the other containing eight scenes from the life of the Blessed Virgin. Fifty-six cuts in the text are made to serve as portraits of 172 different women, and under the strain of such repetition individuality perforce disappears. But at the end of the book are seven cuts of Italian ladies of the fifteenth century: Bona of Lombardy, Bianca Maria of Milan, Catherine Countess of Frejus and Imola, Leonora Duchess of Ferrara, Bianca Mirandula, Genebria Sforza, and Damisella Trivulzia, and these, some of them fair, some rather forbidding, appear all to be genuine portraits. The cutting is mostly rather stiff and heavy (Damisella Trivulzia is exceptionally tenderly treated), and much use is made of black grounds. [Illustration: XVII. FLORENCE, BART. DI LIBRI, C. 1495 LA FESTA DI SAN GIOVANNI. (TITLE)] In contrast to those in the _De claris mulieribus_, the cuts in the _Epistulae_ of S. Jerome are distinctly Venetian in style. As one of the two architectural borders is dated 1493, it is possible that the book was at first intended to be issued at Venice, but was transferred to Ferrara when Venetian interest in small column-cuts was found to be on the wane. It possesses in all over 160 of these, those illustrating conventual life in the second part of the book being much the most interesting.