1. Reviving the Lettera Antiqua


As the Gothic Spirit reached its apex in the other areas of Western Europe, Italy was slowly evolving toward a revival of the culture of antiquity, a renaissance ...there arose an interest in all of the relics and ruins of Roman life. Art works were rediscovered, including ancient Greek sculptures, the Apollo of Belvedere and the Laocoön (above).

Literature was another area of rediscovery— ancient manuscripts were sought throughout Europe. These works were purchased or copied by literary agents, such as the famous Poggio Bracciolini. Although scholars thought the documents were ancient, in many cases they were copies written in Carolingian manuscript.

2. Combining Majuscules and Minuscules

It has often been pointed out that the [Roman] capitals and the (Carolingian] minuscules were not homogeneous elements, the capitals were unmistakably an incised letter style; the Carolingian was strictly a pen design ...

"Of course the scribes noticed that the capitals and small letters did not fit together well so they performed a styling job of adding serifs and finishing strokes in order to suit them to the capitals. By the time the craft of printing was introduced to Italy, the Humanistic writing afforded a fully developed basis for the type style we now call 'roman.'" Nesbitt.

Recommended Reading
Alexander Nesbitt, The History and Technique of Lettering. Dover Publications, 1957.

3. Venice, Printing Capital
Home of Humanistic Metal Type

Many printers settled in the wealthy sea trading city of Venice making it one of the most influential printing centers of the Renaissance. It was here that the Humanistic letterform was first cast as metal type. Although influenced by the punchcutter's sculpting abilities, type from this period still carried the diagonal stress and line weights of the wide nib pen.

Font designs derived from this era fall under a general heading of Old Style and frequently have names such as Antiqua, Ancient, Renaissance, Venetian or Garalde.

Garalde, a sub category of Old Style merges the names Garamond and Aldus Manutius. Generally speaking it is a later, more refined development of Old Style.

4. Northern Printers Arrive in Italy & Adopt the Humanistic Style.

German printing partners Sweynheim and Pannartz were among the first to bring their craft to Italy. They worked in the abby of Subiaco (1464) but shortly thereafter moved to the Massimi Palace in Rome.

Sweynheim, an engraver, was most likely the punch cutter. His designs were influenced by the calligraphic style of the Italian Humanists—yet still retained influences from the Gothic— a hybrid or semi-humanistic form.

See a larger sample here
at the National Diet of Japan

5. Purely Roman Metal Type of
Johannes and Vindelinus de Spira

"The first book printed in Venice was completed in 1469. It was Epistolae ad familiares by Cicero, printed by Johann van Speyer (Giovanni da Spira). The type used by Van Speyers had extraordinary clarity. It consisted of purely roman forms that are directly recognizable as such even by modern standards. The brothers made great claims for their design, seeking in fact to patent it as a new invention. They succeeded in obtaining legal if not practical protection against plagiarism for five years."
(Chappell and Bringhurst, A Short History of the Printed Word).

The sturdy strokes weights were necessary to hold up to the limitations of the early printing process, including uneven pressure from a screw press and rough printing surfaces.

6. Nicholas Jenson + full roman
1470

Working separately from but concurrently with the de Spira brothers, Nicholas Jenson is popularly thought to have made the final definitive break from blackletter style towards a fully evolved roman letterform. Jenson was a Frenchman who first traveled to Germany to learn punchcutting but moved on to Italy where he created his roman types. (See an example 1470 edition of Eusebius, De Evangelica Praeparatione.) "Jenson was a success in his own time, both artistically and financially. Beyond his time he has remained an inspiration ...his early training [of goldsmithing] gave him even greater sensitivities to the sculptural nature of type...the letters Jenson employed were capitals, often beautiful capitals that could summon the spirit of Rome.*

Jenson's highly legible and evenly colored typeface, based upon Humanistic scripts, has been reinterpreted through the centuries by numerous type designers, most notably William Morris's Golden Type, Bruce Roger's Centaur (1914), Morris Benton's "Cloister Oldstyle" (1926) and Robert Slimbach's digital Jenson for Adobe (1996).

7. Aldus Manutius, printer
Francesco Griffo, punch cutter.

Fifteen years after Jenson's death a Venetian publisher, Aldus Manutius, ran a scholarly printing concern that introduced a number of typographic innovations. His early concentration was on Greek literature which necessitated a new Greek metal design. Aldus commissioned Francesco Griffo to cut the punches.

Griffo later produced a number of Latin, or roman fonts, mostly notably for an essay De Aetna, by the Italian scholar Pietro Bembo—for whom the design was named.

Griffo's design was the basis for Stanley Morison's Monotype Bembo in 1929 and subsequent Bembo derivatives. Another face Morison revived from Griffo was Poliphilus, from the text design of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499.

So do not assume that a type face is named for its designer or punchcutter, it can also be named for a printer, a book title or an author.

8. Griffo's Italics
1499

Early books were quite large and hard to hold or transport. Manutius wanted to produce books in hand held proportions for the growing population of Renaissance scholars and students. To fit the content onto a smaller page size he needed a closely-spaced and condensed typeface. Aldus again commissioned Griffo who cut a face which he based upon chancery manuscript, a contemporary round hand, or cursive roman face. The chancery model Griffo used is attributed to Niccolo Niccoli, a Florentine humanist, in the 1420's.

Although Griffo's version was first called Aldinian, it later was referred to as italic (the named derived from Italian). Italic was a separate and distinct face, not a sub-version of a roman family as we use in contemporary type design. Griffo's first italic did not have a sloped form of capitals, romans were used in their place.

9. The French Typographic Renaissance

The great patron of the arts and letters, King Francois I (1494–1547) was infatuated with the Italian Renaissance style and sponsored its establishment in France. Louis supported massive architectural projects reflecting the Renaissance style in royal residences at Chambord and Fontainebleau. He collected Italian books and manuscripts for his royal library and invited scholars from around the world to access his collection. Francois appointed the first official printer to the king which later lead to the founding of the Imprimerie Royale, (French Royal Printing Works). See #14 this page.

His reign was tolerant to religion allowing numerous Protestant printers to operate freely. The expanded field of printers helped raise the quality of French printing to the finest in the world.

10.
The Golden Age of French Typography 1500–1585

French period of prolific type design and superior printing by French printers Robert Estienne, Simone de Colines and Geofroy Tory.

Robert Estienne
His father, Henri was one of the first important French printers — producing books that combined scholarship and high quality printing. Robert was appointed by Francois I as a royal printer of Hebrew, Latin and Greek. Estienne commissioned Garamond to produce the first matched set of roman and italic faces. (Source, Thirty Centuries of Graphic Design, James Craig)

Robert Granjon 1545-88
Granjon designed Civilité, a face based upon gothic cursive writing, as a competitor to the Italian cursive "italic."

Claude Garamond (1480–1561)

Garamond began his career apprenticing and working for printers Simone de Colines and Henri Estienne. When Estienne the elder died Garamond worked independently —the first punchcutter to design and produce type faces for sale to other printers. His type designs, while still classified as Old Style, moved further from the characteristics of calligraphy and are categorized in a subdivision of Old Style named Garalde, (Aldus + Garamond). .. According to Alexander Lawson it is generally believed that Garamond based his types upon the work of Griffo.

The type design sold today under the name of Garamond was not his, but the work of Jean Jannon, who modeled his later type design on Garamond's work. ( See item #12)

Rubens, Prometheus Bound, PMA

Le Romain du roi

12.
Jean Jannon & "Garamond"
(discovery by Beatrice Warde)

"The engraver Jean Jannon ranks among the significant representatives of French typography of the first half of the 17th century. He trained as punch-cutter in Paris. He began working on his own alphabet in 1615, so that he would not have to order type for his printing office from Paris, Holland and Germany, which at that time was rather difficult. The other reason was that not only the existing type faces, but also the respective punches were rapidly wearing out. Their restoration was extremely painstaking, not to mention the fact that the result would have been just a poor shadow of the original elegance. Thus a new type face came into existence, standing on a traditional basis, but with a life-giving sparkle from its creator. In 1621 Jannon published a Roman typeface and italics, derived from the shapes of Garamond's type faces. As late as the start of the 20th century Jannon's type face was mistakenly called Garamond, because it looked like that typeface at first sight. Jannon's Early Baroque Roman type face, however, differs from Garamond in contrast and in having grander forms."
Excerpt from Storm Type Foundry

13.
The King's Roman
Le Romain du roi, 1692

"The calligrapher is replaced by engineer."

King Louis the XIV commissioned an exclusive typeface for the Royal Printing House, The Imprimerie Royale. The face was developed by a committee of mathematicians, philosophers and others who used mathematics rather than calligraphy for the basis of their design—a totally rational approach.

The committee examined letter proportions of height to width, the outlines, the shapes and the negative spaces. The letterforms were placed upon a grid of 64 main squares then subdivided to 2,034. (Another foreshadowing of digital letter design) The resultant letter form had a greater contrast between thin and thick stroke weights. The final master letters were illustrated as copper engravings.

Royal punchcutter Philippe Grandjean, translated the engravings into a slightly warmer version. His metal type translation first appeared in print in 1702.

15. Rococo 1720-1770

Rococo was an ornate and lavish style that echoed the decadent life of the French aristocracy prior to the French revolution. It was packed with flourishes and superfluous decoration.

Pierre Simon Fournier, le jeune
Paris, (b.1712 - d.1768)
Son of type founder Jean Claude Fournier, Simon designed a wide range of decorative ornaments and florid fonts, enabling French printers to create books with a decorative design complexity that paralleled the rococo architecture and interiors of his period. Interestingly French law forbade type founders from printing so Fournier often delivered made-up pages to the printer, thereby assuming the role of graphic designer.

Manuel Typographique, 1764
The pride of every book printer was the publication of a type specimen book - a typographical manual. Fournier's masterpiece, the Manuel Typographique was intended to be four volumes but only two were completed— one is an account of punch cutting and type founding and another is a display of his font and ornamental designs. Shown above is one of his rococo style samples.
Fournier also designed typefaces that moved past the rococo to a more modernized roman. Fournier's 1742 "St. Augustine Ordinaire" (digital above) was revitalized by Monotype in 1924.These types were some of the most influential designs of the eighteenth century, being among the earliest of the “transitional” style of typeface, and were a stepping stone to the more severe “modern” style made popular by Bodoni later in the century. They had more vertical stress than the old style types, greater contrast between thick and thin strokes and little or no bracketing on the serifs.

Fournier introduced a standardized type measurement through his table of proportions (1737) based on the French pouce, a now-obsolete unit of measure slightly longer than an inch.

16. Neoclassicism
1760-1850

In reaction to the frivolous period of the Rococo, artists again looked back at the classical styles of ancient Greek and Rome. With the coming of the Age of Enlightenment, French painting resumed its moral and political purpose and embraced the style known as neoclassicism. Even before 1789, popular taste had begun to turn away from the disarming, lighthearted subjects of rococo; as revolution neared, artists increasingly sought noble themes of public virtue and personal sacrifice from the history of ancient Greece or Rome. They painted with restraint and discipline, using the austere clarity of the neoclassicism.

The same spirit was embraced by typographers who refined and modernized typography as they stepped further from their calligraphic origins. While Baskerville was the pioneer of the neoclassical style letterform, the most extreme forms were developed by Firmin Didot and Giambattista Bodoni.

19. Type in the Netherlands

The Netherlands ascended to type prominence through the works of printers such as Christopher Plantin (ca 1520— 1589). Originally from France, Plantin was trained as a book binder before establishing a successful printing office (using French equipment and French type faces) in Antwerp. (Read the full story on Emigre.)

Christoffel van Dyck (Dijck)
1601-1670
Master punchcutter of old style types, Van Dyck produced designs that were influenced by Garamond but were more condensed and robust in weight. Upon his death the Elzevir printing firm purchased his type and today a digital version is offered through the Dutch Type Foundry (see above right)

Van Dyck's sturdy faces are assumed to the the basis used by William Caslon for his roman type. Historian Stanley Morison later wrote, "Although his type faces are not as important to the historian than those of Garamond, they are certainly more beautiful."

20. English Type Came From Holland

Excerpt from Emigre Essays

“Printing, as a trade, was thriving in England, but there was not yet an identifiably English style in types. Rather, the types then in fashion were of a class now called "Dutch Old Face," which were used for both mercantile and scholarly printing. The majority of these faces dated, at least stylistically, from as early as the late 16th century, with later cuttings being added during the 17th century.”

21. The Fell Types by Peter de Walpergen, in Britain,1672

Because of governmental restrictions on printing and domestic typefounding in England most typefaces were imported — primarily from Holland. The Bishop of Oxford, John Fell assembled the type for the Oxford University Press by importing punchcutter Peter de Walpergen from Holland who brought with him the Dutch typographic style.

The Fell Types are essentially the link between the Dutch Style and Caslon. You can read the complete history of the Fell Types and download a number of free digital versions of the Walpergen font from Igino Marini.