A Dream; Virgin on a Crescent

This Italian sketch by Fortunato Duranti demonstrates the visual storytelling conventions emerging in mid-nineteenth-century European printmaking. The upper panel depicts a narrative scene with multiple figures and spatial recession, while the lower image presents a devotional composition. Both employ the linear drawing style and compositional clarity that would later define sequential art. Though predating the modern comic strip by decades, such works established the visual grammar—distinct framing, figure arrangement, and narrative progression—that artists would systematize in late-century newspaper comics, ultimately creating the visual language of the comic book form.