This kind of design, with a blank space for the owner's arms, is used for many of the beautiful wood-cut borders in the early printed books of Florence and Venice.
Decorative accessories of this sculpturesque kind are largely used in the paintings of Andrea Mantegna of Padua.
And to some extent for manuscripts of religious works as well. This archaic form of letter was also used by Sweynheim and Pannartz and other prototypographers at Subiaco and in Rome; hence it got the name of Roman as opposed to Gothic letter.
One of the finest examples of this style of illumination is in a volume of the Italian translation of Pliny's Natural History, printed on vellum by Nicolas Jenson in Venice in 1476; now in the Bodleian at Oxford.
See Wattenbach, Schriftwesen, Ed. 2, pp. 411 and 469; and Romer, Les Manuscrits de la Bibl. Corvinienne, in l'Art, Vol. X. 1877.