Here is an excerpt from the opening pages of The Jenson Roman, an illustrated essay by Riccardo Olocco, which discusses the Roman typefaces used in Venice by Nicolas Jenson, one of the most successful printers of the 15th century.
15 Novemer 2024
If we were to praise someon in history for the shape of the Latin letters we use today, Nicolas Jenson would be a prime candidate.
There were several major historical steps in the development of our lower – case letterforms – the characters on paper or screen you are reading now – and one of these steps, probably the most pivotal, was carried out by Jenson with the introduction of his roman type1.
I believe it is not an exaggeration to claim that, from a design point of view, the subsequent evolution of roman letterforms since 1470 has been less significant than Jenson’s adaptation of humanistic script for type at that time.
Jenson was able to harmoniously accommodate written letters from humanistic hands onto steel punches, distilling the essence of humanistic script into shapes and proportions that have changed very little in the centuries since.
Jenson’s lowercase letters, cut around 1470 (the sixth distinct type to appear on the Italian peninsula, the second in Venice),2 became the model of almost all roman types that followed. This is the argument I make in the present book, which includes information I have gathered through bibliographical research and analysis of printed type.
If I have done my homework well, by the end of the book you will agree with the argument I am making.
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The model for Jenson’s roman
Jenson based his roman type on a style of humanistic script that was reachinga mature stage of development at that time in the wealthiest and most sophisticated cities of the Veneto region, especially Padua3.
In the 1450s and 1460s a new style of letterforms emerged in the work of local scribes, illuminators and painters who attempted to faithfully revive Roman imperial inscriptions (roughly 1st to 3rd century AD) in their written and painted capitals.
The earliest examples are probably found in the frescos that the young Mantegna painted in Padua from 1451 onwards.4 In the same years we begin to see fully developed imperial capitals in the manuscripts of Bartolomeo Sanvito, Felice Feliciano and several other scribes of the Veneto region [FIG. 1].
A standard was set and its manifesto may be seen in the famous Alphabetum Romanum (1459-1460) in which Feliciano, in his own interpretations of the Roman imperial capitals, showed how to construct them geometrically.5 Moreover, the Roman imperial capitals also acted as models, and local scribes developed minuscules that were and less flowing than the Florentine examples of Poggio Bracciolini and his followers.
The hands of the scribes working in the The Veneto show, according to Wardrop, «a greater care and deliberation in formation of the minuscules», and the tendency to make the letters separately’; moreover, they turned «the blunt and rather amorphous terminal of the early Caroline model […] into the sharp clear serif which seems to “clinch” the letters» [FIG. 2].6
One of the most striking features of these hands is indeed the bilateral serifs taken from the imperial capitals which the scribes began to add at the end of the descending strokes in p and q, and sometimes at the baseline in f, h, i, l, m, n, r, and long s. This is the same shape of serif that is found in the lowercase of de Spira’s and Jenson’s types, but not in any other types that preceded them.
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7Jenson modelled his letterforms after the hands of scribes working in the Veneto region, but I disagree with Updike when he claims that his design was «chiefly a clever transcript of a much more beautiful humanistic manuscript hand».8 If the word «humanistic» were removed, such a statement could be applied to Gutenberg’s textura types or to Jenson’s rotundas.
The punches of these textura and rotunda types were skilful «transcripts» of calligraphic hands that had been established for centuries – since those letterforms reached their full maturity in the scribal tradition point in the late 13th or early 14th century and soon acquired a form.9 This was not the case with humanist minuscules, which were still in development when printing with movable type was introduced to Italy in the 146os. At that time, humanist minuscules were expressed in a wide range of hands, and this is notably true for the Veneto region, where there was no accepted standard such as there was in Florence.10
As noted by Alfred Fairbank, calligrapher and scholar, it was «the stabilising influence of printing» that induced a certain uniformity in the humanistic hand, toward the end of the 15th centyry.11 It seems clear to me that this lack of stability and uniformity in the script was crucial for the development of roman type. Due to the lack of established calligraphic models, when cutting the punches for his roman Jenson had greater freedom to experiment with letterforms than he had in cutting the punches for his rotunda types.
Due to the lack of established calligraphic models, when cutting the punches for his roman Jenson had greater freedom to experiment with letterforms than he had in cutting the punches for his rotunda types. Without the constraints of an established graphic tradition, which is evident in textura and rotunda, Jenson was able to move away from the scribal letterforms and conceive ideal forms for his type that were better suited to the material (steel) and tools (files and gravers) that were used to cut the punches.
In other words, he loosely adapted written letterforms (perhaps from more than one hand) to the typographic medium, following the freedom of design that punchcutting could offer – compared to the limitations of written letters executed by hand and pen. Rather than a «transcript», Jenson’s roman is an adaptation of the humanistic hand into type.
Riccardo Olocco is an Italian type designer, professor, and researcher in the history of typography. Here is his bio.
- Throughout the book the term ‘type’ is preferred over ‘typeface’ which is a 20th-century word linked to the technology of that century: a typeface is a set of drawings or, today, a collection of digital outlines. ‘Type’ on the other hand can have different meanings but is a more appropriate term to refer to an identifiable set of punches and matrices from which fonts of type were cast.
↩︎ - The list of the five earliest known types that appeared on italian soil is as follows: Sweynheym and Pannartz 120SG, Subiaco 1465 (BMC IV 1, TW 1:120R); Han 150G, Rome 1467 (BMC IV 17, TW 1:150G); Sweynheym and Pannartz 115R, Rome 1468 (BMC IV 4, TW 2:115R); Han86R, Rome 1468 (BMCIV 17, TW 2*:86R); de Spira 110R, Venice 1469 (BMC V 152, von Speyer 1:110R). This list does not include the primitive rotunda type of the so-called Parson-Scheide fragment (IST ip00147000), wich could hae preceded all the others but has not yet been studied in detail.
↩︎ - ZAMPONI, ‘Le metamorfosi dell’antico’.
↩︎ - Such as the frescos in the Ovetari Chapel, Padua, partially destroyed by Allied bombing in 1944.
↩︎ - Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 6852. The letters are about 8 cm high, painted in different colors, with one letter on each page. They show no grid for geometric construction and reproduce the division between areas of light and shade within the letters caused by the depth of the v-cut, as seen in real monumental lettering. Several facsimiles have been published, including one by officina Bodoni in 1960: MARDERSTEIG (ed), Alphabetum Romanum.
↩︎ - WARDROP, The Script of Humanism, p.8.
↩︎ - TWOMEY, ‘Whence Jenson’ and HARGREAVES, ‘Florentine script, Paduan script, and roman type’.
↩︎ - UPDIKE, Printing Types, vol. 1, p. 234, Although he made some criticisms of his roman, Updike did not fail to praise Jenson and his work when he introduced him in his Printing Types (see vol. 1, pp. 73-76).
↩︎ - CENCETTI, Lineamenti di storia della scrittura latina, pp. 210-214. See also DEROLEZ, The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books, pp. 101, 111.
↩︎ - DE ROBERTIS, ‘Motivi classici nella scrittura del primo Quattrocento’, PP.73-74.
↩︎ - FAIRBANK & WOLPE, Renaissance Handwriting, p. 22.
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