Rhiannon Daniels writes, however, that "this was not humanistic bookhand written cursively, but a running script written with a very fine pen a modification of contemporary gothic chancery script influenced by humanistic bookhand hence it is sometimes known as cancelleresca all'antica". The neat, sloping, humanist cursive invented by the Florentine humanist de' Niccoli in the 1420s and disseminated through his numerous scholars is usually characterized as essentially a rapid version of the same script. The new script was embraced and developed by the Florentine humanists and educators Niccolò de' Niccoli and Coluccio Salutati. By the time the Medici library was catalogued in 1418, almost half the manuscripts were noted as in the lettera antica. The Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci recalled later in the century that Poggio had been a very fine calligrapher of lettera antica and had transcribed texts to support himself- presumably, as Martin Davies points out- before he went to Rome in 1403 to begin his career in the papal curia.īerthold Ullman identifies the watershed moment in the development of the new humanistic hand as the youthful Poggio's transcription of Cicero's Epistles to Atticus. The generator of the new style ( illustration) was Poggio Bracciolini, a tireless pursuer of ancient manuscripts, who developed the new humanist script in the first decade of the 15th century. A more thorough reform of handwriting than the Petrarchan compromise was in the offing. īoccaccio was a great admirer of Petrarch from Boccaccio's immediate circle this post-Petrarchan "semi-gothic" revised hand spread to literati in Florence, Lombardy and the Veneto. For Petrarch the gothic hand violated three principles: writing, he said, should be simple ( castigata), clear ( clara) and orthographically correct. Florentine poet Petrarch was one of the few medieval authors to have touched on the handwriting of his time in two letters he criticized the current scholastic hand, with its protracted strokes ( artificiosis litterarum tractibus) and exuberant ( luxurians) letter-forms amusing the eye from a distance, but fatiguing on closer exposure, as if written for other purpose than to be read. The letterforms were based on a synthesis of Roman inscriptional capitals and Carolingian writing. After the mid-20th century, Fraktur fell out of favor and Antiqua-based typefaces became the official standard.Īntiqua typefaces are typefaces designed between 14 AD, specifically those by Nicolas Jenson and the Aldine roman commissioned by Aldus Manutius and cut by Francesco Griffo. The two typefaces were used alongside each other in the germanophone world, with the Antiqua–Fraktur dispute often dividing along ideological or political lines. Letters are designed to flow and strokes connect together in a continuous fashion in this way it is often contrasted with Fraktur-style typefaces where the individual strokes are broken apart. Antiqua ( / ˈ æ n t ɪ k w ə/) is a style of typeface used to mimic styles of handwriting or calligraphy common during the 15th and 16th centuries.
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