Crumbling elegance: floriated tailpiece with criblé backgrounddetails

This typographic decoration was printed as a tail-piece at the end of a chapter. The stippled white dots on a black background are called a criblé effect; this style was popular in the sixteenth century, and it’s possible that the wood-engraving for this ornament was old, although more likely it’s a nineteenth-century German copy. It has vine leaves and a fleur-de-lys with three balls under it and one over it.