The essay deals with Adolfo De Carolis’ illustrations for Gabriele D’Annunzio’s tragedy Francesca da Rimini (1902). The first collaboration between the poet and the artist is the beginning of a long and fruitful partnership and represents one of the first Italian experiments of “Libro d’arte” (artistic book) as forerunner of the twentieth-century “Libro d’artista” (artist book). It is an exceptional edition, destined for a few lucky owners, a sui generis work of decorative art and a place of linguistic, iconographic, and iconological experimentation. At a closer look, the volume is actually an object destined to a real campaign of commercial promotion of D’Annunzio’s theatrical opera and of his person indeed, perhaps one of the first examples of what today on call “merchandising”. From a stylistic point of view, the book reveals the peculiarities of De Carolis’ language, based on a synthesis of English Arts and Crafts, Italian artistic tradition, and the study of the most famous of Renaissance incunabula, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499). It is precisely this attention to the past and to history that brings De Carolis to a position far removed from the European art nouveau in which historiography often places this decorative work and its author.
