Typography Papers 6 (review)

The title of Typography Papers is misleading, since its interests range far beyond the worlds of typography and type design to encompass letterforms of all kinds — whether calligraphic, inscriptional, mechanical, or electronic — and their uses. It should be of interest to paleographers, epigraphers, art historians, graphic designers, and all others whose work involves visual language. The current issue is a perfect example of this.

Typography Papers 6 is dedicated to examining the rediscovery of Roman capitals in Renaissance Italy and their enshrinement as the dominant public letter in the Baroque era. The articles are: "The Newberry Alphabet and the Revival of the Roman Capital in Fifteenth-Century Italy" by Nicolete Gray, "Leon Battista Alberti and the Revival of the Roman Inscriptional Letter in the Fifteenth Century" by Giovanni Mardersteig, "Brunelleschi's Epitaph and the Design of Public Letters in Fifteenth-Century Florence" by Paul Stiff, and "Giovan Francesco Cresci and the Baroque Letter in Rome" by James Mosley.

The revival of the Roman inscriptional capital in Renaissance Italy — and its subsequent development — is a topic that is long overdue for a critical reappraisal, making this issue of Typography Papers very welcome. Between 1954, when Dario Covi wrote "Lettering in the Inscriptions of Fifteenth-Century Florentine Paintings" (Renaissance News 7), and 1972, when Stanley Morison's posthumous Politics and Script was published, the subject actively engaged the attention of art historians and others, including Gray, Mardersteig, and Mosley. Since then interest in Renaissance letters has largely waned as Millard Meiss's groundbreaking essay "Toward a More Comprehensive Renaissance Paleography" (Art Bulletin 42), intended as a call for more research on this topic, ended up being treated by many as a summation of the subject.

One of the key texts of the first generation of scholars to examine Renaissance lettering was Mardersteig's 1959 essay "L. B. Alberti e la rinascita del carattere lapidario romano nel quattrocento" (Italia Medioevale e Umanistica 2). It is translated into English for the first time in Typography Papers 6. Whereas Gray had focused on the sans serif letter that Ghiberti and Donatello pioneered in Florence between 1410 and 1430, Mardersteig shifted the emphasis to seriffed capitals constructed along geometric lines that appeared after the middle of the century. He championed Alberti, Felice Feliciano, and Damiano da Moyle as the trio "who were responsible for the initiation, the spread and the definitive form of a new type of alphabet derived from the Roman inscriptional letter under the influence of the spirit of humanism" (65).

One of the constructed alphabets mentioned by Mardersteig, but not included in his essay, was an anonymous and undated one in the Newberry Library. Gray's detailed analysis of this alphabet (Wing MS ZW 141.481), originally written in 1987, is published here for the first time. She deftly compares the Newberry Alphabet to those of Feliciano, Moyllus, and Fra Luca Pacioli. Its letters (completely reproduced at actual size) are notable for the inclusion of two forms of M and N (the first of which is Trajanic), as well as a T with asymmetrical crossbar serifs.

Stiff's essay follows Meiss's injunction to expand our knowledge of Renaissance inscriptions by looking at Buggiano's epitaph for Brunelleschi. While he makes no claim for Buggiano as a principal force in the development of the Roman capital in the fifteenth century, his discussion of the inscription is exemplary in its thoroughness. It is especially gratifying to read an analysis that looks at both the individual letters and the layout as a whole from the viewpoint of someone knowledgeable about design and typography. This is the sort of analysis that needs to be applied to other Renaissance inscriptions, including most of those that we think we already know in detail (such as the tomb of Martin V and Baldassare Cossa).

Mosley's essay on Cresci is an extension of "Trajan Revived" (Alphabet 1964), the first — and still most important — article surveying the fate of the Roman capital after 1500. Here he has examined the work...