These images offer a kind of baseline. More medieval than Renaissance, the mark a moment when readers and viewers are just turning to works like Ovid's Metamorphoses not for allegorized readings of classical texts as illustrating Christian mysteries as in the Old French Ovide Moralizé (both the verse version done in the 13th century or the prose version from the 15th century) but out of a renewed interest in the old stories themselves which, by the last third of the 15th century have become the basis for paintings by artists like Botticelli, Giovanni Bellini, and Andrea Mantegna, and which in the works of 16th-century Venetian masters like Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese become the subjects of beautiful, powerful, and moving works of art.

Our images can be dated stylistically to an anonymous Venetian artist working for a humanest press in the first decade of the 16th century.