COM 263 - Chapter Seven (Key Terms)

Renaissance

(“Revival” or “rebirth”) Originally used to denote the period that began in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Italy, when the classical literature of ancient Greece and Rome was revived and read anew, the word is now generally used to encompass the period marking the transition from the medieval to the modern world. In the history of graphic design, the Renaissance of classical literature and the work of the Italians humanists are closely bound to an innovative approach to book design.

Trademark

An emblem designed, in this case, to identify the books produced by a certain printer. These emblems bear witness to the revived attention to Egyptian hieroglyphics during the Renaissance and are forerunners to those used in modern graphic design.

Reversed Designs

White forms on a solid background

Type Specimen Sheet

Displays a range of typographic sizes and styles. The first printer’s type specimen sheet was issued by Erhard Ratdolt upon his return to Augsburg, Germany from Venice.

Fleurons (printer’s flowers)

Decorative elements cast like type. An edition of Ars Moriendi published on April 28, 1478, by Italian printers Giovanni and Alberto Alvise in Verona is believed to be the first design that used fleurons. The Verona Ars Moriendi used these as graphic elements on the title page design and as fillers in short lines that left blank areas in the text blocks.

Humanism

A philosophy of human dignity and worth that defined man as capable of using reason and scientific inquiry to achieve both an understanding of the world and self-meaning. A turning away from medieval beliefs toward a new concern for human potential and value characterized Renaissance humanism.

Pocket Book

Developed by Aldus Manutius, a smaller book, made more economical by being set in an italic type font. Between the smaller size type and the narrower width of italic characters, a fifty percent gain in the number of characters per line of a given measure were achieved.

Cancelleresca

A slanted handwriting style favored among scholars for is speed and informality,

Renaissance Man

A unique individual of genius whose wide-ranging activities in various philosphoic, literary, artistic, or scientific disciplines result in important contributions to more than one field.

Headpiece

An ornamental design at the top of a page.

Tailpiece

An ornamental design at the bottom of the page.

Arabesque

A complex, ornate design of intertwined floral, foliate, and geometric figures.

Imagines Mortis

(The Dance of Death) The procession in which skeletons or corpses escort the living to their graves was a major theme in the visual arts as well as in music, drama, and poetry. This use of art as an ominous reminder to the unfaithful of the inevitability of death originated in the fourteenth century, when the great waves of plague swept of Europe.

Bracketing

The connecting curves that unify the serif with the main stroke of the letter.

Johannes da Spira (d. 1470)

A Mainz goldsmith, was given a five-year monopoly on printing in Venice and published his first book, Epistolae ad familiares (letter to families) by Cicero, in 1469. His innovative and handsome roman type cast off some of the Gothic qualities found in the fonts of Sweynheym and Pannartz. Da Spira’s 1470 edition of De civitate Dei, printed in partnership with his brother, Vindelinus, was the first typographic book with printed page numbers.

Nicholas Jenson (c. 1420-80)

A Master of the Royal Mint of Tours, France, was a highly skilled cutter of dies used for striking coins. He established Venice’s second press shortly after Johannes da Spira’s death. In 1458, King Charles VII of France sent Jenson to Mainz to learn printing. His fame as one of history’s greatest typeface designers and punch cutters rests on the types first used in Esebius’s De praeparatione evangelica (Evangelical Preparation), which presents the full flowering of Roman type design. Part of the lasting influence of Jenson’s fonts is their extreme legibility, but it was his ability to design the spaces between the letters and within each form to create an even tone throughout the page that placed the mark of genius on his work. During the last decade of his life, Jenson designed outstanding Greek and Gothic fonts and published approximately 150 books, which brought him financial success and artistic renown. The characters in Jenson’s fonts aligned more perfectly than those of any other printer of his time.

Erhard Ratdolt (1442-1528)

Achieved significant design innovations toward the totally printed book. A master printer from Augsburg, Germany, Ratdolt worked in Venice from 1476 until 1486. Collaborating closely with his partners Bernhard Maler and Peter Loeslein, Ratdolt’s 1476 Calendarium (Record Book) by Regiomontanus had the first complete title page used to identify a book. Yet another innovation by Ratdolt was the way woodcut borders and initials were used as design elements. These decorative features included naturalistic forms inspired by western antiquity and patterned forms derived from the Eastern Islamic Cultures. A three-sided woodcut border use on the title page for a number of Ratdolt’s editions became a kind of trademark. It appears  on the title page of Euclid’s Geometriae elementa (Elements of Geometry) of 1482.

Johannes Nicolai de Verona

The printer listed in a 1472 printing of De Re Militari (About Warfare) by Roberto Valturio. It is quite possible that this printer was actually Giovanni Alvise. The light contour style of woodblock illustration used in De Re Militiari initiated the fine-line style that became popular in Italian graphic design during the later decades of the fifteenth century.

Aldus Manutius (1450-1515)

An important humanist and scholar of the Italian Renaissance who established Aldiine Press in Venice to realize his vision of publishing the major works of the great thinkers of the Greek and Roman worlds. Important scholars and skilled technical personnel were recruited to staff Aldline Press, which rapidly became known for its editorial authority and scholarship. Aldine’s 1499 edition of Fra Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Strife of Love in ta Dream of the Dream of Poliphilus), a masterpiece of graphic design, achieved an elegant harmony of typography and illustration that has seldom been equaled. Manutius addressed the need for smaller, more economical books by publishing the prototype for the pocket book.

Francesco da Bologna Surnamed Griffo (1450-1518)

A brilliant typeface designer and punch cutter at Aldine Press. Griffo cut roman, Greek, Hebrew, and the first italic type for Aldine editions. His initial project in Venice was a roman face for De Aetna by Pietro Bembo in 1495. Griffo researched pre-Caroline scripts to produce a roman type that was more authentic than Jenson’s designs. This style survives today as the book text face Bembo. Griffo’s typefaces became the model for the French type designers who perfected roman letterforms during the following century.

Lodovico de Arrighi (d. c. 1527)

The Italian master calligrapher, printer, and type designer who created the first of many sixteenth-century writing manuals. His small volume of 1522, entitled La operina da imparare di scivere littera cancellaresca (The First Writing Manual of the Chancery Hand) was a brief course using excellent examples to teach the cancellaresca script.

Henri Estienne (1470-1520)

One of the early French scholar-printers who became enthusiastic about books printed in roman types with title pages and initials inspired by the Venetians.

Simon de Colines (1480-1546)

Henri Estienne’s foreman, who ran the family business until his stepson, Robert Estienne (1503-1559), was able to take over in 1526.

Robert Estienne (1503-59)

Son of Henri Estienne, he became a brilliant printer of scholarly works in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. His growing reputation as a publisher of great books, including a major Latin dictionary, enabled the young Estienne to become one of the leading figures in France during this grand period of book design and printing.

Geoffory Tory (1480-1533)

A true renaissance man whose accomplishments ranged from professor, scholar, and translator to poet and author’ from publisher, printer, and bookseller. to calligrpaher, designer, illustrator, and engraver. He translated, edited, and often published Latin and Greek texts. As a reformer of the French language, he introduced the apostrophe, the accent. and the cedilla. In the graphic arts, he played a major role in importing the Italianate influence and then developing a uniquely French Renaissance school of book design and illustration. Tory’s Champ Fleury (subtitled The art and science of the proper and true proportions of the attic letters, which are otherwise called antique letters, and in common speech roman letters), first published in 1529, was his most important and influential work. In Champ Fleury, Tory discusses the history of roman letters and compares their proportions with the ideal proportions of the human figure and face. Errors in Albrecht’ Durer’s letterform designs in the recently published Underweisung der Messung are carefully analyzed, and Tory offers instructions in the geometric construction of the twenty-three letters of the Latin alphabet pn background grids of one hundred squares. Tory’s message about the Latin alphabet influenced a generation of French printers and punch cutters, and Tory became the most influential graphic designer of the century.

Claude Garamond (c. 1480–1561)

Typeface designer and punch cutter. The first to work independently of printing firms, he established his type foundry to sell printers cast type ready to distribute into the compositor’s case. This was the first step away from the model based on one person as scholar, publisher, type founder, printer, and bookseller all in one, which had begun in Mainz some eighty years earlier. Garamond’s roman typefaces were designed with such perfection that French printers in the sixteenth century were able to print books of extraordinary legibility and beauty. The fonts Garamond cut during the 1540s achieved a mastery of visual form and a tighter fit that allowed closer word spacing and a harmony of design between capitals, lowercase letters, and italics. The influence of writing as a model diminished in Garamond’s work, for typography was evolving a language of form rooted in the processes of making steel punches, casting metal type, and printing instead of imitating forms created by hand gestures with an inked quill on paper.

Oronce Finé (1494–1555)

A mathematics professor and author whose abilities as a graphic artist complemented his scientific publications. In addition to illustrating his own mathematics, geography, and astronomy books, Finé became interested in book ornament and design. He worked closely with printers, notably Simon de Colines, in the design and production of his books (Fig. 7–40). Finé’s mathematical construction of ornaments and the robust clarity of his graphic illustration are the work of an innovative graphic designer.

Johann Froben (1460–1527)

Basal’s leading printer, who attracted the outstanding humanist scholar of the Northern Renaissance, Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1543), to the city. For eight years, beginning in 1521, Erasmus worked with Froben as author, editor, and adviser on matters of scholaship. Unlike most of his German contemporaries, Froben favored hearty, solid roman types rather than Gothics.

Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543)

A painter who arrived in Basel from Augsburg in the autumn of 1519 and was engaged by Froben to illustrate books. His border designs were sculptural and complex and often included a scene from the Bible or classical literature. His prolific designs for title pages (Fig. 7–43), headpieces, tailpieces, and sets of illustrated initials ranged from the humorous (peasants chasing a fox), to genre (dancing peasants and playing children), to a morbid series of initials depicting the Dance of Death. His greatest graphic work was the forty-one woodcuts illustrating Imagines Mortis (The Dance of Death) (Fig. 7–44).

Johann Oporinus

Became Basel’s leading printer. His masterpiece was the enormous 667–page folio De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Construction of the Human Body) (Fig. 7–45) by the founder of modern anatomy from Brussels, Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564). This important book was illustrated with full-page woodcuts of remarkable clarity and accuracy by artists working from dissected corpses under Vesalius’s supervision.

Jean de Tournes (1504–64)

Opened a firm in Lyons and began to use Garamond types with initials and ornaments designed by Tory. He retained his fellow townsman, Bernard Salomon, to design headpieces, arabesques, fleurons, and woodblock illustrations. The excellent book design of these collaborators was further enhanced (Fig. 7–47) when they were joined by Robert Granjon, a Parisian type designer working in Lyons.

Robert Granjon (d. 1579)

The most original of the designers inspired by Garamond’s roman faces. Granjon created delicate italic fonts featuring beautiful italic capitals with swashes and attempted to add a fourth major style—in addition to Gothic, roman, and italic—when he designed and promoted the caractères de civilité (characters of civility), a typographic version of the French secretarial writing style then in vogue. Due to its poor legibility, civilité was just a passing fancy. The fleurons designed by Granjon were modular and could be put together in endless combinations to make headpieces, tailpieces, ornaments, and borders.

Christophe Plantin (1514–89)

The Netherlands found its greatest printer in Plantin. Classics and Bibles, books on herbs and medicine, music and maps—a full range of printed matter—poured from what became the world’s largest and strongest publishing house. Plantin’s design style was a more ornamented, weightier adaptation of French typographic design. The use of copperplate engravings instead of woodcuts to illustrate his books was Plantin’s main design contribution.

Stephen Daye (c. 1594–1668)

A British locksmith who brought printing to he North American colonies. The first printing was done in early 1639, and the first book to be designed and printed in the English American colonies was the The Whole Book of Psalmes (not called The Bay Psalm Book) of 1640.

Christoffel van Dyck:

A Dutch designer and punch cutter whose types, which had stubby serifs with heavy bracketing and fairly stout hairline elements (Fig. 7–54), were designed to resist the wear and tear of printing. Van Dyck’s 111 matrixes and types were used continuously until 1810, when the fashion for the extreme thicks and thins of modern-style types unfortunately led the Haarlem foundry that owned them to melt them down to reuse the metal.