Roman Type Wasn’t Built in a Day

I orig­i­nal­ly wrote the fol­low­ing post as a research paper for an under­grad­u­ate art his­to­ry class. Later, I took the text and used it as the basis for design­ing a book in a graph­ic design class. I’ve always loved all that I learned on the project and can hon­est­ly say that I enjoyed every hour I spent either in the library read­ing or in front of the print­er try­ing to get spreads to line up.

an intro­duc­tion to typography’s begin­nings based on a his­tor­i­cal research paper

Typography, and graph­ic design in gen­er­al, is an ever evolv­ing, process dri­ven field. This is the same today as it was 500 years ago when mass print­ing was just begin­ning in Europe. By exam­in­ing the evo­lu­tion and typog­ra­phy of this incunab­u­la peri­od, the novice design­er can learn both the intri­ca­cies and his­to­ry of type.

The Italian Renaissance that occurred from the four­teenth through six­teenth cen­turies caused rev­o­lu­tion­ary changes in human his­to­ry that still impact soci­ety and cul­ture today. One aspect that wit­nessed phe­nom­e­nal change was that of book pro­duc­tion. Technological achieve­ments com­bined with cul­tur­al revival of clas­si­cal antiq­ui­ty cre­at­ed stan­dards of pro­duc­tion and typog­ra­phy that have served as the foun­da­tions of both fields since their incep­tion more than five hun­dred years ago. The change was an evo­lu­tion­ary process that involved both cre­ative inspi­ra­tions from the clas­sics of Greece and Rome as well as trial and error refine­ment of print­ing techniques.

Western civ­i­liza­tion devel­oped reusable, move­able type around 1440. The major break­through came from the per­fec­tion of the mold in which to cast each block of type. With this new method, hun­dreds of pieces of type could be cast in a day allow­ing for mass pro­duc­tion of print­ed mate­ri­als. (Dowding 3) From its ini­tial birth around Mainz, Germany the inno­va­tions quick­ly spread through­out Europe as entre­pre­neurs saw the poten­tial for mass print­ed mate­r­i­al in other mar­kets and began estab­lish­ing press­es across the con­ti­nent. Having found its way to Italy, print­ing and typog­ra­phy under­went fun­da­men­tal changes at the hands of human­ist schol­ars and the print­ers asso­ci­at­ed with pro­vid­ing these edu­cat­ed men with read­ing material.

Two Germans, Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz estab­lished the first print­ing press on Italian soil at Subiaco near Rome in 1465. (Dowding 20) They brought with them the con­ven­tions of German type that had devel­oped from the for­mal man­u­script hands that flour­ished dur­ing the Middle Ages. (Dowding 5) This style of type is known as tex­tu­ra for its very dense, dark pres­ence on a page and tex­tured effect cre­at­ed by the con­densed let­ter­forms. Humanist schol­ars later labeled the style black let­ter and goth­ic for its asso­ci­a­tion with the unen­light­ened, bar­barous era of the Middle Ages. Textura let­ter­ing devel­oped from the need for a quick, effi­cient writ­ing style for scribes who had to hand­write books dur­ing the Middle Ages and to con­serve space on a page. (Meggs 54) Mass print­ing elim­i­nat­ed the need for a quick writ­ing style. The knowl­edge of mak­ing paper had also spread along trade routes from East Asia to Europe and had low­ered the cost of mate­ri­als on which to print. (Meggs 64)

These tech­ni­cal advances were cou­pled with human­ist research into clas­si­cal texts. Scholars such as Francesco Petrarch and Coluccio Salutati were work­ing from the late fourteenth-century onwards at spread­ing the clas­si­cal writ­ings of ancient Greek and Roman authors, poets, and philoso­phers. Besides reviv­ing their ideals, these human­ist schol­ars also sought to revive the ancient writ­ing styles found in these vol­umes of clas­si­cal texts. They saw tex­tu­ra let­ter­ing as the writ­ing of the bar­bar­ians who had destroyed clas­si­cal civ­i­liza­tion and thus want­ed to return to what they believed was authen­tic Roman writ­ing. (Twomey 137) The writ­ing was in fact from the ninth through eleventh cen­turies in a form known as Carolingian minus­cule from the schol­ar­ly revivals of Charlemagne. He orga­nized and ordered the stan­dard­iza­tion of writ­ing in scrip­to­ri­ums and the revival of clas­si­cal lit­er­a­ture. This move pre­served the knowl­edge of clas­si­cal antiq­ui­ty that the human­ist schol­ars later relied on when they sought their own revival in the fourteenth-century. (Meggs 49)

The pref­er­ence by the Italian human­ists for Carolingian minus­cule over goth­ic tex­tu­ra was firm­ly in place by 1465 when Sweynheym and Pannartz began print­ing in Italy. The human­ists also admired the orig­i­nal Roman majus­cules found inscribed on the ruins of ancient mon­u­ments such as Trajan’s col­umn. These two very dif­fer­ent styles of let­ter­forms were in need of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion if they were to be used in har­mo­ny by a print­er. Sweynheym and Pannartz real­ized this when they moved to Rome in 1468 and revised their ini­tial type to have thin­ner strokes and more space between let­ters. However, the res­o­lu­tion of these type­styles into a defin­i­tive form was achieved by Nicolas Jenson in Venice in 1470.

Nicolas Jenson had stud­ied print­ing in Mainz and moved to Venice around 1468 to take advan­tage of the emerg­ing mar­ket for books. (Meggs 94) Once in Venice, Jenson stud­ied the inscrip­tion­al majus­cules and cur­rent human­ist script minus­cules in prepa­ra­tion for cut­ting his new type. Jenson thinned the strokes on his minus­cules as well as adding more round­ness to the let­ters. These changes cre­at­ed a more even tone across a page bal­anc­ing pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive spaces. The rev­o­lu­tion­ary change though in Jenson’s type is the addi­tion of ser­ifs to the minus­cule char­ac­ters. Combining the swoosh lead­ing out of a pen drawn let­ter with the chis­eled per­pen­dic­u­lar end­ings of the Roman majus­cules, Jenson uni­fied the two styles into one. This is his­tor­i­cal­ly viewed as the first true roman type thus estab­lish­ing a new typestyle.

Jenson used his type to print 155 books from 1470 until his death in 1480. The type and press were bought by one of Jenson’s work­men Andrea Torresani who would later be instru­men­tal in estab­lish­ing the Aldine Press of Aldus Manutius. (Barolini 47) Besides influ­enc­ing the Aldine Press, Jenson’s type has served as inspi­ra­tion through the years to typog­ra­phers wish­ing to cre­ate their own roman types as well as estab­lished roman let­ters as the de facto type for text and read­ing mate­r­i­al in Western cul­ture. This estab­lish­ment owes in part to the pro­lif­er­a­tion of print­ed books by Aldus Manutius start­ing in 1495. (Dowding 32)

A human­ist schol­ar and tutor, Aldus Manutius ded­i­cat­ed his life to teach­ing the lan­guage and writ­ings of Greece. Through con­nec­tions with the human­ists of Italy and the help of Andrea Torresani, Aldus gath­ered Greek texts and orga­nized the print­ing of an incal­cu­la­ble amount of knowl­edge. His con­tri­bu­tions to typog­ra­phy are equal­ly as immense sim­ply by the sheer extent to which his works spread, and were copied, car­ry­ing with them both the ideals of the Renaissance and the roman type cut by Francesco Griffo and based on Jenson’s model. Aldus also pio­neered book lay­outs and alter­na­tive mov­able types.

The Aldine roman can be seen in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili that Aldus print­ed in 1499. The book also illus­trates the inte­gra­tion of imagery and type on a page as well as the over­all lay­out of mar­gins and space. These design char­ac­ter­is­tics were adopt­ed through­out book pro­duc­tion and still hold influ­ence today over the posi­tion­ing of text for gen­er­al read­ing mate­r­i­al. Another lay­out Aldus pio­neered was that of a small­er page size, 3.75 by 6‑inch over the 8 by 11.9‑inch. (Meggs 101) For this small­er space, Aldus had Griffo cut a new type that com­bined the new ser­ifs of the roman type­style with the slant­ed com­pressed nature of script hand­writ­ing. Thus, the first ital­ic type was born in 1500.

An even greater achieve­ment of the Aldine Press was its res­cue and pro­lif­er­a­tion of clas­si­cal works in Greek. For such an under­tak­ing, Aldus over­saw the cre­ation of a Greek type­face mod­eled on the hand­writ­ing of Greek schol­ars and scribes and cut by Griffo. (Davies 14) Aldus also pio­neered two tech­niques in asso­ci­a­tion with print­ing Greek types and accents. The process involved what is known as lead­ing, or adding space between lines of type. This allowed the sec­ond tech­nique of adding accents through­out a line of type instead of hav­ing unique let­ters cut for every pos­si­ble accent. (Davies 18) Both meth­ods increased the flex­i­bil­i­ty of print­ing and how a page could be arranged.

A final under­tak­ing that was never com­plet­ed by the Aldine Press due to Aldus’ death was a Polyglot Bible. An ini­tial proof sheet from 1501 sur­vives show­ing a three-column lay­out of cor­re­spond­ing Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The Greek and roman types used are not new, but the Hebrew is a new cre­ation by Griffo. The first in Venice, the type is extra­or­di­nary for its geom­e­try and ground­break­ing use as edu­ca­tion­al mate­r­i­al for human­ist stud­ies. (Davies 52)

It is worth men­tion­ing that better-executed, more leg­i­ble types later replaced the Aldine ital­ic and Greek start­ing around 1525. (Dowding 47) These improve­ments under­score the nature of Aldus and Griffo’s work as steps in the evo­lu­tion of typog­ra­phy that con­tin­ues to this day. Their work was inven­tive and orig­i­nal for its time, but it was inspired by Jenson who was inspired by the human­ists who were inspired by the Carolingian scribes; it went on to inspire the sixteenth-century typog­ra­ph­er Claude Garamond in Paris and later in the eighteenth-century William Caslon I in England. (Dowding 32)

Today, typog­ra­phy and print pro­duc­tion have under­gone anoth­er sig­nif­i­cant change in the move from mate­r­i­al to dig­i­tal work­spaces. Typefaces no longer phys­i­cal­ly exist as metal pieces but as pix­els of light on com­put­er screens. The change is sim­i­lar to the move from hand­writ­ing to move­able type that occurred in the fifteenth-century. New pos­si­bil­i­ties with a new medi­um were cre­at­ed and typog­ra­phers looked to the past for inspi­ra­tion in try­ing to re-create past types, to update them, and to com­plete­ly reject them in search of bet­ter ways of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, much like Sweynheym, Pannartz, Jenson, Griffo, and Aldus did at the birth of print­ing and typography.

Their con­tri­bu­tions refined and per­fect­ed the tech­ni­cal achieve­ments of Mainz and pro­vid­ed the foun­da­tion for Western typog­ra­phy that we still use today. They also pro­vid­ed the process of look­ing at the past for inspi­ra­tion. As such, these great works of Italian Renaissance book pro­duc­tion stand as hall­marks of their field and as pil­lars of human civ­i­liza­tion for the knowl­edge and spir­it they preserved.

For More Inspiration / Works Cited

1. Baronlini, Helen. Aldus and His Dream Book. New York, New York: Italica Press, 1992.
2. Davies, Martin. Aldus Manutius: Printer and Publisher of Renaissance Venice. Malibu, California: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995.
3. Dowding, Geoffrey. An Introduction to the History of Printing Types. New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 1998.
4. Fletcher III, Harry George. New Aldine Studies. San Francisco: Bernard M. Rosenthal, Inc, 1988.
5. Meggs, Philip, and Alston W. Purvis. Meggs’ History of Graphic Design. 4th ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2006
6. Seaby, Allen W. The Roman Alphabet and its Derivatives. London: B.T. Batsford, Ltd, 1925.
7. Szepe, Helena Katalin. “Desire in the Printed Dream of Poliphilo.” Art History 19 (1996): 370–392.
8. Twomey, Juliet Spohn. “On Type Whence Jenson: A Search for the Origins of Roman Type.” Fine Print 15 (1989): 134–141.