The folk tale has a manifold nature and a complex literary status. It is usually assumed that the evolution from the purely oral tales of the popular tradition to the first records of the literary Märchen was accomplished by the Piacevoli Notti of Giovan Francesco Straparola (1554). Indeed, one or two century earlier the Cantari gave for the first time a literary and written form to the old folkloristic patterns of several tales. The wide success of these texts is wit_nessed by a long living printing tradition, that unbrokenly links the illustrated sheets of the Renaissance to the cheap books of the 19th century, and by several artifacts, like the Embriachi`s caskets (1380-1410), or the portrait of Simonetta Vespucci by Pietro di Cosimo (1480).