The decorated initial (lettrine) comes from the manuscript tradition: the scribe would leave a blank space for the initial, which the illuminator would then paint, ranging from a simple coloured stroke to the great historiated I occupying the margin. The first printers preserved this blank space and had the initial painted by hand, then replaced it with woodcuts: the large criblé-ground initials of the Parisian workshops, the putti-and-foliage initials of Lyon and Venice, the fanciful alphabets of the Renaissance. In the 17th and 18th centuries, typographic ornament was added to these, and typefounders supplied series of ornamental letters; in the 19th century, the decorated initial became an element of the Romantic illustrated book, designed anew for each work.
For the bookseller, decorated initials act as a signature: each workshop had its own series, described in reference works on typographic ornament, and a particular initial can allow a book without an imprint to be attributed, or two editions of the same date to be distinguished. In a luxury book of the 17th or 18th century, an Office de la Semaine Sainte for instance, the text is framed by engraved initials, headpieces and tailpieces; in a modern illustrated book, the number of woodcut initials forms part of the justification of the illustration and is recorded in the catalogue entry. Initials painted or hand-coloured on a printed book are noted as such.
The decorated initial is sometimes confused with the title letter or with the plain initial, which is merely an undecorated capital. A book's title may contain the word without the work itself containing any — Julien Gracq's Lettrines is a collection of fragments. Lastly, initials coloured after the fact, in the 19th century, on a 16th-century book to enhance its appearance, are not period painted initials.
