Another style which may be traced in many books of the early years of the century is a rather coarse development of the characteristic Florentine manner of the fifteenth century. The cuts are as a rule considerably larger than the Florentine ones, and the ornamental borders which surround them are much deeper. As in many of the Florentine cuts, more use is made of black spaces than was usual at Venice, but the cutting as a rule is coarse, and there is none of the charm of the best Florentine work. Woodcuts in this style are found most frequently on the titlepages of popular books in small quarto, published by the Sessas, who apparently did not see their way to commissioning more than a single illustration to each book. But the influence of the style affected the pictures in a few works of larger size--for instance, the 1503 edition of the _Chronica Chronicarum_ of Bergomensis, and the well-known picture of a choir in the _Practica Musices_ of Gafori (1512). Despite his connection with the _Hypnerotomachia_, which, however, was printed on commission, Aldus concerned himself little with book-illustrations, and if the miserable cuts which he put into his edition of _Hero and Leander_ of Musaeus are fair specimens of what he thought sufficiently good when left to himself, he was well advised in holding aloof from them. Nevertheless, the popularity which he gained for the small octavos which he introduced in 1501 was an important factor in the development of book-illustration in the sixteenth century. Although Aldus did not illustrate them himself, it was impossible that the lightly printed handy books which he introduced should remain permanently unillustrated, and when italic type was ousting roman and small books taking the place of large, the introduction of smaller illustrations, depending for their effect on the delicacy of their cutting, became inevitable. If we take any popular book of the century, such as the _Sonetti_ of Petrarch, and note the illustrations in successive editions, we shall find them getting smaller and smaller and more and more lightly cut and lightly printed, in order to match better with the thin italic types. The new style is seen at its best in the books of 1540-60, the Petrarch of 1544 printed by Gabriel Giolito, Boccaccio's _Decamerone_ printed by Valgrisi in 1552, Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ by Giolito in 1553. Finally, book-illustration peters out at Venice in pictorial capitals, which take as their subjects any heroes of Greek and Roman history and mythology whose names begin with the required letter, on the principle of the nursery alphabet in which "A was an Archer who shot at a frog, B was a Butcher who had a great dog." To an age which, not otherwise to its loss, neglects the study of Lempriere's Classical Dictionary, many of these puzzle initials are bafflingly obscure, relieved only by a recurring Q, which in almost all alphabets depicts Quintus Curtius leaping into the chasm at Rome. Some