<p>Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-1374) worked over many years on his long historical text about the Lives of ancient Roman military heroes, <i>De viris illustribus</i> (<i>On Famous Men</i>). Left unfinished at his death, the text was completed by 1379 by Petrarch’s colleague, Lombardo della Seta. Within a decade, <i>De viris illustribus</i> was translated into Italian; and in 1476 the <i>Libro degli uomini famosi </i>was printed in Poiano outside of Verona by the eccentric humanist and scribe, Felice Feliciano (1433–1479/1480). The edition includes a peculiar feature: preceding each of the Lives is a page on which is printed an interlace woodcut border within which, however, no image appears. </p><p>The present book surveys the hand-illumination of twenty surviving copies of Felice’s edition in order to investigate: the Renaissance fascination with the classical past; the artistic traditions of representing <i>Uomini famosi</i>; the technical problems of illustrating books with woodcuts; and the <i>fortuna </i>of the 1476 edition. Two copies contain sequences of heroes painted within the woodcut borders; these heroes provide evidence for reconstructing the appearance of the ‘lost’ frescoes of famous men painted at the end of Petrarch’s lifetime in the Carrara palace in Padua. The hand-illumination of other copies can be assigned to miniaturists working in Venice, Verona, Ferrara, Florence, Rome and elsewhere, suggesting Felice Feliciano’s wide-reaching efforts to market the volume. The importance of studying copy-specific features in Renaissance printed books is further documented by the thirty-two colour plates and over ninety black-and-white figures.</p>