Lively alphabets were a specialty of the 16th century, and artists and designers produced many fanciful letter designs, often inhabited by all manner of creatures and people. This single sheet, containing the whole alphabet, is a tour de force of invention and careful planning. The letters, each of which is constructed of a complicated interlace that resembles embroidery, merge and intertwine in a perfectly balanced ballet. The voids within the letters and the spaces between them are occupied by a host of fanciful characters, who seem almost to be cavorting in an alphabetical forest. The sheet is unsigned, but the artist seems likely to have worked in, or at least been strongly influenced by, the artistic circles around the French court at Fontainebleau in the 1540s. The only certain clue to the print’s origins is the date 1546, tucked between Y and Z on a little banderole.

---