Calligraphy
Table of Contents
Introduction
Early Semitic writing
Arabic calligraphy
Indic calligraphy
Greek handwriting
Latin-alphabet handwriting
In the Middle East and East Asia, calligraphy by long and exacting tradition is considered a major art, equal to sculpture or painting. In Western culture the plainer Greek- and Latin-derived alphabets and the spread of literacy have tended to make handwriting in principle an art that anyone can practice. Nonetheless, after the introduction of printing in Europe in the mid-15th century, a clear distinction arose between handwriting and more elaborate forms of scripts and lettering. In fact, new words meaning �calligraphy� entered most European languages about the end of the 16th century, and in English the word
It has often been assumed that the printing process ended the manuscript tradition. This is not quite true: for example, most of the surviving books of hours (lavish private devotional manuscript books) date from the period after the introduction of printing. Furthermore, certain types of publications, such as musical scores, scientific notation, and other specialized or small-audience works, continued to be handwritten well into the 19th century. Thus, although handwritten books could not be reproduced in quantity or with complete uniformity, they did survive the introduction of printing. Printing and handwriting began to influence each other: for example, modern advertising continues to incorporate calligraphy, and many calligraphers have through the years designed typefaces for printing.
During the 2nd millennium bce, various Semitic peoples at the eastern end of the Mediterranean were experimenting with alphabetic writing. Between 1500 and 1000 bce, alphabetic signs found in scattered sites showed a correspondence of form and provided material for sound translations. Bodies of writing from this period are fragmented: a few signs scratched on sherds or cut in stone. Few of these are celebrated in terms of aesthetic value.
One interesting set of Semitic inscriptions was discovered in 1905 at an ancient mining site on the Sinai Peninsula. A sphinx from that discovery yields the
The several Semitic peoples in the Middle East area spoke languages that were closely related, and this enabled them to use the same set of alphabetic signs. After some experimentation the alphabet was reduced to 22 signs for consonants. There were no vowel signs. The tribes of Canaan (Hebrews, Phoenicians, and Aramaeans) were important in the development of alphabetic writing, and all seemed to be employing the alphabet by 1000 bce.
The Phoenicians, living along a 20-mile (30-kilometre) strip on the Mediterranean, made the great sea their second home, giving the alphabet to Greeks in the mutual trading area and leaving inscriptions in many sites. One of the finest Phoenician inscriptions exists on a bronze cup from Cyprus called the Baal of Lebanon (in the Louvre, Paris) dating from about 800 bce. The so-called Moabite Stone (also in the Louvre), which dates from about 850 bce, has an inscription that is also a famous example of early Semitic writing.
Old Hebrew existed in inscription form in the early centuries of the 1st millennium bce. The pen-written forms of the Old Hebrew alphabet are best preserved in the 13th-century-ce documents of the Samaritan sects.
The exile suffered by the Israelites (586�538 bce) dealt a heavy blow to the Hebrew language, since, after their return from exile, Aramaic was the dominant language of the area, and Hebrew existed as a second and scholarly language. Aramaic pen-written documents began to appear in the 5th century bce and were vigorous interpretations of inscription letters. Typically, in the surviving documents, the pen was cut wide at the tip to produce a pronounced thick and thin structure to the line of letters. The writer�s hand was rotated counterclockwise more than 45 degrees relative to vertical, so that vertical strokes were thinner than the horizontal ones. Then, too, there was a tendency to hold these strong horizontals on the top line, with trailing descenders finding a typical length, long or short on the basis of ancient habits. The
The traditional square Hebrew, or
Spread of Aramaic to the Middle East and Asia
Aramaic was the mother of many languages in the Middle East and Asia. Generally, the Canaanite-Phoenician influence spread west from Palestine, while Aramaic became an international language spreading east, south, and north from the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. Never sponsored by great political power, the Aramaic script and language succeeded through inherent efficiency and because the Aramaeans were vigorous traders and extensive travelers in the millennium preceding the Common Era.
One of the important languages to derive from Aramaic was Syriac. It was spoken over large areas to the north and east of Palestine, but the literature emerged from a strong national church of Syria centred in the city of Edessa. The development of Syriac scripts occurred from the 4th to the 7th century ce.
Eastern Christendom was riddled with sects and heretical movements. After 431 the Syriac language and script split into eastern and western branches. The western branch was called Serta and developed into two varieties, Jacobite and Melchite. Vigorous in pen graphics, Serta writing shows that, unlike the early Aramaic and Hebrew scripts, characters are fastened to a bottom horizontal. Modern typefaces used to print Syriac, which has survived as a language, have the same characteristic. Eastern Syriac script was called Nestorian after Nestorius, who led a secession movement from the Orthodox Church of Byzantium that flourished in Persia and spread along trade routes deep into Asia.
In the 7th and 8th centuries ce the Arab followers of Muhammad conquered territories stretching from the shores of the Atlantic to Sindh (now in Pakistan). Besides spreading the religion of Islam, the conquerers introduced written and spoken Arabic to the regions under their control. The Arabic language was a principal factor in uniting peoples who differed widely in ethnicity, language, and culture. In the early centuries of Islam, Arabic not only was the official language of administration but also was and has remained the language of religion and learning. The Arabic alphabet has been adapted to the Islamic peoples� vernaculars just as the Latin alphabet has been in the Christian-influenced West.
The Arabic script was evolved probably by the 6th century ce from Nabataean, a dialect of Aramaic current in northern Arabia. The earliest surviving examples of Arabic before Islam are inscriptions on stone.
Arabic is written from right to left and consists of 17 characters, which, with the addition of dots placed above or below certain of them, provide the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet. Short vowels are not included in the alphabet, being indicated by signs placed above or below the consonant or long vowel that they follow. Certain characters may be joined to their neighbours, others to the preceding one only, and others to the succeeding one only. When coupled to another, the form of the character undergoes certain changes.
These features, as well as the fact that there are no capital forms of letters, give the Arabic script its particular character. A line of Arabic suggests an urgent progress of the characters from right to left. The nice balance between the vertical shafts above and the open curves below the middle register induces a sense of harmony. The peculiarity that certain letters cannot be joined to their neighbours provides articulation. For writing, the Arabic calligrapher employs a reed pen (
Broadly speaking, there were two distinct scripts in the early centuries of Islam: cursive script and Kūfic script. For everyday purposes a cursive script was employed: typical examples may be seen in the Arabic papyri from Egypt. Rapidly executed, the script does not appear to have been subject to formal and rigorous rules, and not all the surviving examples are the work of professional scribes. Kūfic script, however, seems to have been developed for religious and official purposes. The name means �the script of Kūfah,� an Islamic city founded in Mesopotamia in 638 ce, but the actual connection between the city and the script is not clear. Kūfic is a more or less square and angular script. Professional copyists employed a particular form for reproducing the earliest copies of the Qurʾān that have survived. These are written on parchment and date from the 8th to the 10th century. They are mostly of an oblong as opposed to codex (i.e., manuscript book) format. The writing is frequently large, especially in the early examples, so that there may be as few as three lines to a single page. The script can hardly be described as stiff and angular; rather, the implied pace is majestic and measured.
Kūfic went out of general use about the 11th century, although it continued to be used as a decorative element contrasting with those scripts that superseded it. About 1000 a new script was established and came to be used for copying the Qurʾān. This is the so-called
Distinctive scripts were developed in particular regions. In Spain the
Both Persia and Turkey made important contributions to calligraphy. In these countries the Arabic script was adopted for the vernacular. The Persian scribes invented the
A characteristic script developed in Ottoman Turkey was that used in the chancellery and known as
There has always existed in the Islamic world a keen appreciation of fine handwriting, and, from the 16th century, it became a practice to assemble in albums specimens of penmanship. Many of these assembled in Turkey, Persia, and India are preserved in museums and libraries. Calligraphy, too, has given rise to quite a considerable literature such as manuals for professional scribes employed in chancelleries.
In its broadest sense, calligraphy also includes the Arabic scripts employed in materials other than parchment, papyrus, and paper. In religious buildings, verses from the Qurʾān were inscribed on the walls for the edification of the faithful, whether carved in stone or stucco or executed in faience tiles. Religious invocations, dedications, and benedictory phrases were also introduced into the decoration of portable objects. Generally speaking, there is a close relationship between these and the scripts properly used on the conventional writing materials. It was often the practice for a skilled penman to design monumental inscriptions.
The most important examples of calligraphy to develop from Aramaic writing in its dissemination through South and Central Asia were the scripts of India, especially of Sanskrit. Indic writing first appeared in the 3rd century bce during the reign of Ashoka (
Copper was a favoured material for Indic inscriptions. In the north of India, birch bark was used as a writing surface as early as the 2nd century ce. Many Indic manuscripts were written on palm leaves, even after the Indian languages were put on paper in the 13th century. Both sides of the leaves were used for writing. Long rectangular strips were gathered on top of one another, holes were drilled through all the leaves, and the book was held together by string. Books of this manufacture were common to Southeast Asia. The palm leaf was an excellent surface for pen writing, making possible the delicate lettering used in many of the scripts of southern Asia.
Visually, Sanskrit is associated most closely with the alphabetic form named Devanagari. In a 15th-century pen-written manuscript in the Freer Gallery at Washington, D.C., it can be observed that the pen�s nib is cut wide, giving a considerable difference in thick and thin strokes. The alphabetic signs hang down from a strong horizontal top line that may become connected. Through the years the strong horizontal and vertical emphasis of inscription writing has been preserved in the Devanagari script, and modern typefaces and teaching manuals stress this stiffness of execution. In informal documents this historical script can have more warmth and grace.
The oldest Greek writing, syllabic signs scratched with a stylus on sun-dried clay, is that of the Linear B tablets found in Knossos, Pylos, and Mycenae (1400�1200 bce). Alphabetic writing, in use before the end of the 8th century bce, is first found in a scratched inscription on a jug awarded as a prize in Athens. The consensus is that the Homeric poems were written down not later than this time; certainly from the time of the first known lyric poet of ancient Greece, Archilochus (7th century bce), individuals committed their works to writing. But the vehicles of literary writing have perished. Scratchings on pottery or metal and then texts deliberately cut in bronze or marble or painted on vases are, until about 350 bce, the only immediate evidence for the way the Greeks wrote, and their study is normally treated as the province of epigraphy.
A find in 1962 at Derv�ni (Dherv�nion), in Macedonia, of a carbonized roll of papyrus (Archaeological Museum, Thessalon�ki, Greece) offers the oldest example of Greek handwriting and the only one preserved in the Greek peninsula (end of the 4th century bce). From then until the 4th century ce, there are countless texts, especially on papyrus. Found in Egypt and, with a few exceptions, written there, these texts have given a firm foundation for knowledge about the handwriting of the era. From outside Egypt there is a Greek library buried in Herculaneum, 79 ce; and papyri and parchments from Owrāmān, Kurdistan, 1st century bce; from Dura-Europus on the Euphrates, 3rd century bce to 3rd century ce; from Nessana, 6th century ce; and from the Dead Sea area (Qumrān, 1st centuries bce and ce; Murabbaʿat and ʿEn Gedi, 2nd century ce). A number of original vellum manuscripts have survived from the 4th century ce onward, preserved in libraries such as at the monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai. These materials of diverse origin suggest that the forms and shape of Greek handwriting were remarkably constant throughout the Greek world, wherever writing was practiced and whatever material was used; within this consistent framework it is occasionally possible to distinguish local variations (as between the contract hands of 1st-century-ce Dura and of Egypt).
The principal vehicles for writing were wax tablets incised with a stylus or a prepared surface of skin, such as leather and vellum, or of papyrus written on with a pen. Other surfaces�e.g., broken pieces of pottery, lead, wood, and even cloth�were also used. To some extent the forms of letters were affected by the resistance of the material to the writing instrument. It is likely that the use as a pen of a hard reed, split at the tip and cut into a nib (which had to be constantly sharpened), is an invention of the Greeks. Egyptian scribes used a soft reed, with which ink was brushed on.
Until about 300 ce, ink was usually made of a fine carbon powder such as lampblack, mixed with gum arabic and water, which even today retains its black lustre. Carbon inks were then replaced by iron-gall inks made from a mixture of tannic acid (made from oak galls soaked in water), ferrous sulphate, and gum arabic. There seem to have been several reasons for the changeover to iron-gall inks: they were easier and more economical to make, they could be made in quantity, and they did not flake off the surface of vellum (which was becoming the preferred writing surface of the time) as carbon inks did. Iron-gall ink does have certain drawbacks: it has a tendency to fade and oxidize over time, turning from a dark grayish-black when freshly written to a characteristic brown (which today is often associated with early manuscripts), and it sometimes has a corrosive effect on vellum, causing the writing from one side of a page to bleed through to the other. On paper, some iron-gall inks have actually eaten through the writing surface. Erasures, which could be made on wax with the blunt end of a stylus and on papyrus by wiping with a wet sponge, were more difficult on vellum written with iron-gall inks. Corrections were made by scraping the faulty text off with the edge of a knife, rubbing the surface with an abrasive, and then burnishing it to make it smooth enough to receive ink again. Sometimes when vellum was not easily available or was relatively expensive, an outdated text might be erased and written over. Since the ink actually dyes the vellum, traces of the original text often remain and appear faintly under newly written text. Such doubly written manuscripts are called palimpsests.
Papyrus was normally sold in rolls (
The early Christians deliberately chose the commercial vellum notebook (
The fundamental distinction in types of handwriting is that between book hands and documentary hands. The former, used especially for the copying of literature, aimed at clarity, regularity, and impersonality and often made an effect of beauty by their deliberate stylization. Usually they were the work of professionals. Outstanding calligraphy is not common among papyrus finds, perhaps because they are mainly provincial work. But the British Museum Bacchylides (discussed further under �The Roman period,�
Documentary hands show a considerable range: stylized official �chancery� hands, the workaday writing of government clerks or of the street scribes who drew up wills or wrote letters to order, the idiosyncratic or nearly illiterate writing of private individuals. The scribe�s aim was to write quickly, lifting the pen very little and consequently often combining several letters in a continuous stroke (a ligature); from the running action of the pen, this writing is often termed cursive. Scribes also made frequent use of abbreviations. When the scribe was skillful in reconciling clarity and speed, such writing may have much character, even beauty; but it often degenerates into a formless, sometimes indecipherable, scrawl.
Both types of hand, in spite of the different styles they assume at different periods, show remarkable uniformity and continuity in the shapes of letters. Behind both lies an unvarying basic alphabetic form taught in the schools. The more skillful a book-hand scribe was, the harder it is to date the scribe�s work. Documents in the ancient world carried a precise date; books never did. To assign dates to the latter, paleographers take account of their content, the archaeological context of their discovery, and technical points of book construction (e.g., quires, rulings) or modes of abbreviation. But they find of great service: (1) a stylistic comparison with those dated documentary hands that show resemblances to book hands, and (2) those cases where a roll was reused�i.e., has a literary text on its recto and a dated document on its verso (in which case there is an estimate for the literary text, generally no more than 50 years before the date of the verso) or has a dated document on the recto and a book hand on the verso (which gives a possible date for the literary text of not more than 25 years after the document). The number of illustrated manuscripts of this period is small; their quality is varied; and there is no agreement among specialists about the sources from which illustrations were taken.
Any historical sketch is bound to be a simplification. At certain epochs several different styles of handwriting existed simultaneously, so that there is no straight line of development. Moreover, owing to the arbitrariness of finds, generalizations are based mainly on provincial work; and, even in that, examples of book hand belonging to the 2nd century bce and the 5th century ce are still relatively rare. Ptolemaic period
In the roll from Derv�ni, Macedonia, dated on archaeological grounds to the 4th century bce, lines and letters are well spaced and the letters carefully made in an epigraphic, or inscription, style, especially the square E, four-barred Σ, and arched Ω; the whole layout gives the effect of an inscription. In the Timotheus roll in Berlin (dated 350�330 bce) or in the curse of Artemisia in Vienna (4th century bce), the writing is cruder, and ω is in transition to what is afterward its invariable written form. Similar features can be seen in the earliest precisely dated document, a marriage contract of 311 bce. It has been argued that a documentary hand of cursive type had not yet been developed and that it was a creation of the Alexandrian library. Plato, however (
Characteristic of its period is the contrast of size between the long letters (e.g., ) and narrow letters . And characteristic forms are to be seen in the letters (with its long crossbar, often with initial stroke); (upsilon) with long shallow bowl; or in three or four strokes; in three strokes; (alpha) raised off the line and its last vertical not finished; small round (with internal dot or tiny stroke); and broad epigraphic and . In documentary cursive hands of this period, letters seem to hang from an upper line: (alpha) often turns into a mere wedge, and (nu) lifts its second vertical above the line.
In the 2nd century bce the contrast between long letters and narrow letters disappears, the writing grows rounder, and letters are often linked by ligatures at the top of their last vertical (e.g., ). In a loan contract of 99 bce (The John Rylands University Library of Manchester), in which capitals and cursive are mixed, this irregular roundness is clearly seen. Note the ε with detached crossbar and the exaggerated serifs which have been elevated by some paleographers into a criterion of a special style, though in fact they are always apt to occur.
Half a century or so passed after 30 bce before a definitely Roman manner was established. In documentary hands the tendency to roundness continued. Documentary cursive may be influenced in various ways (e.g., by Latin forms such as those of
If this writing is made to lean to the right and to revive the 3rd-century-bce distinction between narrow and broad letters, it takes on the aspect of the �severe� style of the Bacchylides roll in the British Museum (2nd century ce). If, however, the scribe makes the verticals or obliques thicker and his horizontals thinner, the hand is called biblical uncial, so named because this type is used in the three great early vellum codices of the Bible: Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus of the 4th century and Codex Alexandrinus of the 5th century. It is now certain that this style goes back to the 2nd century ce. Heavy decoration is also a feature of the Coptic style, of which there are examples as early as the 2nd century ce. This hand may be thought of as constituting a special case of biblical uncial.
For the paleographer the significant division is not the founding of Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) in 330 but the 5th century, from which a few firmly dated texts survive. At its close a large, exuberant, florid cursive was fully established for documents; in the 7th and 8th centuries it sloped to the right, became congested, and adopted some forms that anticipated the minuscule hand. A favourite informal type of the 6th century is shown in an acrostic poem by Dioscorus of Aphrodito; it bears a clear relationship to the Menander
To judge when and where a Greek manuscript was written is as difficult for this as for the earlier period, but for different reasons. The material for study is admittedly more extensive; manuscripts produced in the Middle Ages and Renaissance have been preserved in very large numbers (more than 50,000 whole volumes survive, of which probably 4,000 or 5,000 are explicitly dated), and they include work from most parts of the Byzantine Empire as well as from Italy. The difficulty of the paleographer lies in the essential homogeneity of the material, which is largely the result of the conditions in which the manuscripts were produced.
The fully developed Byzantine Empire of the 8th to the mid-15th centuries was extraordinarily uniform in its culture. Its contraction in space after the Arab conquests of the 7th century, which cut off the more distant and ethnically differentiated provinces of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, made it a relatively compact geographical entity. The continuity and comparative stability of a single empire not divided into distinct national states such as evolved in the West resulted in a strength and unity of tradition of which the Byzantines were always conscious and that shows in their habits of writing no less than in their literature and art. Distinct local styles and sharp breaks in ways of writing in different periods cannot, therefore, be looked for; characteristics that may be especially typical of one period emerge gradually and disappear equally slowly. A more potent factor than date or place in producing divergences in the style of writing is the purpose for which a manuscript was designed and what type of scribe wrote it. Late uncial, 9th to 12th century
There is a gap in the evidence covering the 7th and 8th centuries, because of the Arab conquest of Egypt, the perpetual wars on all fronts in the 7th century, and the iconoclastic struggle among Eastern Christians during the 8th and early 9th centuries, so that no literary texts (and very few others) have survived that can actually be dated to this period.
During this time the evolution of writing in capitals (a style called uncial) probably continued toward a greater formality and artificiality. But this natural tendency was hastened by the introduction and spread of minuscule as the normal way of writing, after which the purpose of uncial changed completely. From an everyday hand in which all books were naturally written, it became a ceremonial hand used only for special copies and therefore grew increasingly stylized and artificial. In the 9th century a still elegant style was used for both patristic and classical works in splendid volumes destined for the imperial library or for presentation copies, such as the copy of Gregory of Nazianzus (Biblioth�que Nationale, Paris) made for the emperor Basil I between 879 and 883. By the 11th and 12th centuries, capitals were used only for liturgical books, mainly lectionaries, which had to be read in dimly lit churches; but the increasing tortuousness of the style must in the end have reduced its usefulness, and by about 1200 uncial was dead.
By far the most important development that took place during the 7th�8th-century gap was the introduction of minuscule. There is no incontrovertible evidence of how this came about, or where. What scraps of evidence there are (a few documents from the gap, a few sentences in lives of the abbots of Stoudion of that time, and the first dated manuscript written in true minuscule) point to its development from a certain type of documentary hand used in the 8th century and to the likelihood that the monastery of the Stoudion in Constantinople had a leading part in its early development. Though its origins are obscure, the reasons that led to its introduction and rapid spread are obvious: the state of poverty resulting from wars and persecutions coincided with a shortage of papyrus after the Arab conquest of Egypt in the middle of the 7th century, and these factors combined to induce a search for a more economical use of the relatively expensive vellum; the polemics of the iconoclastic controversy demanded a speedy, informal style of writing; and, finally, when peace was restored in the middle of the 9th century, the revival of learning, with the reorganization of the university, brought the need for multiplying plain workmanlike texts for scholarly purposes.
The earliest dated example of true minuscule (and it is probably one of the oldest extant examples altogether) is a Gospel written in 835 (Porfiry Gospel; National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg), probably in the monastery of the Stoudion. Here are found all the characteristics of the earliest minuscule, which is called pure minuscule because there is as yet no admixture of uncial forms, except occasionally at line ends. The letters are even and of a uniform size; letters are joined or not joined to each other according to strict rules, sometimes by ligatures in which part of each letter is merged in the other, but not to the extent of distorting the shape of either letter. There is no division between words, for the divisions are only those that arise from the rules for joining or otherwise of individual letters, and at this stage any letter that can be joined to the next one nearly always is joined to it. Breathings, which affect pronunciation, are square, either or , and accents are small and neat; abbreviations are very few, usually confined to the established contractions for
Absolutely pure minuscule did not last long. Gradually, uncial forms of those letters that had specifically minuscule forms began to be used alongside the minuscule forms: λ was the first to appear, followed by ξ and then κ, all by the end of the 9th century. Then from about 900 onward, γ, ζ, ν, π, and σ were used regularly, while α, δ, ε, and η were used sometimes. Not before about 950 were β, μ, υ, ψ, and ω used, and still comparatively rarely. But by the end of the 10th century, the interchangeability of all uncial and minuscule forms was complete, though all the alternative forms are not necessarily found in any one manuscript. Perhaps the earliest dated manuscript with any uncial form in it is of 892/893 (Mount Sinai, Saint Catherine, MS. 375 + St. Petersburg, Bibl. Publ. MS. 343, Chrysostom), but pure minuscule continued to be used, in probably the majority of manuscripts, up to 900 and thereafter mainly in provincial manuscripts until the last dated example in 969 (Met�ora, Metamorph. MS. 565, John Climacus). Besides the intrusion of uncial letters, some other characteristics of the earliest minuscule were modified during the 10th century. Rounded breathings, symbolized by the marks � and �, are first found in manuscripts of the last half of the century, interspersed with square ones. From about 925 the practice of making the writing hang from the ruled lines began to prevail. Although in most manuscripts abbreviations were confined to a few forms used at line ends only, a few copies dated in the last part of the century used nearly all the conventional signs.
Formal minuscule, 10th to 14th century
From about the middle of the 10th century, a smoother, almost mechanical appearance can be noticed in an increasing number of manuscripts; the hands seem more stereotyped, less individual. They are not immediately distinguishable from the plainer styles of the earlier part of the century, and their evolution during the next four centuries was very gradual. A few distinct types can be singled out from time to time. A bold, round, heavy liturgical style, fully established in the 11th century, was one of the most enduring types; it became more and more stereotyped and mechanical until, in the 15th century, a branch of it was transplanted to Italy.
The style most widely used for biblical and patristic texts from the end of the 10th century, probably mainly in monastic houses in Constantinople, was one with plain, neat, rounded letters; this style became known as
Manuscripts written outside Constantinople are recognizable, if at all, usually by a rougher, provincial appearance. Only two styles can be assigned with any certainty to a specific provincial centre. One, a small unpretentious hand used by Nilus of Rossano" class="md-crosslink">Saint Nilus of Rossano, the founder of numerous monasteries in southern Italy at the end of the 9th century, was used for a time by others in that area. In the heyday of the reorganized Greek monasteries there in the 12th century, another elegant, rather mannered style, which almost certainly had its origin in Constantinople, is nevertheless found in manuscripts known to have been written in southern Italy and Sicily.
These particular styles, however, are not really as typical of the period as the less distinctive plain hands in which the majority of the manuscripts are written, at least in the 11th and 12th centuries.
The comparatively uniform type of writing of which all these were minor variations was remarkably enduring and widely dispersed, but, from the 11th century onward, certain changes may be observed that help to date manuscripts written in all types of formal minuscule. One change in its general appearance may be noticed as the 12th century advanced: an increasing lightness of touch and a lessening of the closely knit, rather thick appearance that is characteristic of the 11th century. But the most noticeable change in this period is the breakdown in the evenness and regularity of the writing, which is partly attributable to the influence of documentary and the later personal hands. It is not, however, entirely so attributable, for a tendency to enlarge some letters out of proportion to the size of the rest is seen in a small way in some of the more personal hands of the earliest period. But it is rare in formally written manuscripts, only gradually becoming more general until, in the 12th and 13th centuries, it is the most noticeable feature of even the most formal hands. In the 14th century and later there was a return to less flamboyant ways with the tendency to imitate earlier models more closely, but the habit of enlarging some and diminishing the size of other letters never died out.
In the actual forms of letters used in these formal styles, there was practically no change; very occasionally, from the end of the 10th century onward, one of the �modern� forms of letter normally confined to personal hands found its way into a formal manuscript. Much the same is true of ligatures. The tendency from the 11th century onward was to use ligatures and to join letters less automatically than in earlier times. The permissive rules and most of the forms remained unchanged, for, already in the 10th century, most of the distorting forms (notably those in which the ε is represented only by a C-shaped stroke; e.g., for σε) were well established, and in formal manuscripts these, with the earlier forms, continued in use until they were illogically taken over by the first printers of Greek. Time did, however, gradually increase the tendency to join letters by insetting them in or superimposing them upon each other. Abbreviations were even more conservatively used, only the oldest conventional forms being admitted, and often only a very few and those only at line ends.
The rule that the writing should hang from the ruled lines, already applied in most manuscripts by the mid-10th century, became invariable by the middle of the 11th. Square breathings (used indiscriminately among the round ones) were gradually eliminated, though they did not completely disappear from formal manuscripts until the middle of the 12th century. The practice of joining accents with breathings and also with the letters to which they belonged spread from personal hands to formal writing in the 13th century, but it was far more often avoided altogether.
Apart from the actual writing, one development is common to all manuscripts written in this period: the use of paper instead of vellum, which occurred first perhaps in the late 11th century and was common by the 13th century whenever economy was a major consideration.
These are the main criteria by which a formally written manuscript can be assigned to an earlier or a later part of this period. But the problem of distinguishing different styles and their dates, and their places of origin, remains most difficult for these Greek manuscripts. Personal hands, 12th to 14th century
From the beginning of minuscule, there were obviously educated individuals who occasionally copied texts for their own use in a formal hand that nevertheless had a distinctive personal flavour; indeed, professional scribes occasionally used a less formal style than usual. Several dated examples of this type of hand survive from the 10th, 11th, and early 12th centuries, but they are rarities. Toward the end of the 12th century, however, the prosperity and comparative stability of the Comnenan age (named from the dynasty of Byzantine emperors bearing the name Comnenus), with its brilliant literary and artistic achievements, gave way to increasing internal chaos and the hostile encirclement of Byzantium that was a prelude to the Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople by the Western powers in 1204. Scholars perhaps already felt the pinch of poverty, which naturally grew greater during the exile of the Byzantine court (1204�61) and culminated in the economic crises of the 14th century.
Certainly, a change in writing habits began slowly to take place. Instead of commissioning professional scribes to copy manuscripts, some scholars began to make copies for themselves, and, in place of the smooth, mechanical styles of the professionals, they used the sort of writing that they presumably already used for personal notes. This was an adaptation (for greater clarity) of the type of writing that had been standardized in official documents from the beginning of the Byzantine period. Its chief characteristic was the greatly exaggerated size of certain letters or parts of letters, particularly letters with rounded bows such as β, ε, ζ, θ, κ, ξ, ο, υ, ϕ, and ω, and the excessive size of these letters is made to look even more unbalanced by some exceptionally small forms of, for example, η, ι, ν, or ρ. This essentially unbalanced, �wild� look was transplanted to literary manuscripts written by scholars for their own use.
Along with this exaggerated contrast in size between letters, they took from the documentary hands several new forms of letters that had gradually evolved from the originally common forms of both hands. In the 12th century the new scholarly hands began to use with separate small bows; , with a broken back; , which had lost its high first stroke; and , which had dropped its first long downstroke; and, by the end of the 13th century, , with a short embryonic tail. The old forms of ligature were kept basically the same but in some cases were reduced to a barely recognizable minimum (e.g., or for ει) and in others were distorted by the general flourishing tendency of the script (e.g., for επ). Abbreviations were naturally used with great frequency in all positions; the ancient conventional signs for suppressed syllables, which had acquired rounded and more flourished shapes, were used alongside a certain amount of �arbitrary� abbreviation in which a large part of a word was omitted and replaced simply by a general sign that some abbreviation had taken place.
Accents and breathings joined with each other, with letters, and with abbreviation marks are found earlier and more frequently in scholarly than in formal manuscripts. The only exception to the rule of round breathings in this type of manuscript is in cases of deliberate archaism such as practiced by Demetrius Triclinius.
One of the earliest datable examples of these scholarly productions is the copy of his commentary on Homer�s
By the end of the 14th century, Italian scholars were learning Greek, and they were bringing back Greek manuscripts from Constantinople. At this time Greek scholars had also begun to teach in Italy. The Greek that the earliest Italians learned to write was a clear, simple style taught originally by Manuel Chrysoloras (died 1415). But, although they copied a number of manuscripts for themselves in this hand, the style had no influence beyond their small circle.
Before long, Greek scribes began to go to Italy, and both scholars and scribes arrived in increasing numbers as the Turks pressed in around the Byzantine capital until it finally fell in 1453. They brought with them, naturally, the two styles of writing that had persisted throughout the history of the empire. On the one hand, professional scribes such as Joannes Rhosus (died
It was on the scholarly hands that Aldus Manutius and other early Italian printers of Greek based their types. But perhaps the most enduring was that of a group of Cretan scribes who were employed by the French king Francis I in his library at Fontainebleau. The writing of one in particular, Angelus Vergecius, was used as a model for the French Royal Greek type, which has influenced the form of Greek printing down to the present day. Ruth Barbour The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Latin-alphabet handwriting
To understand the development of modern Western calligraphy it is important to survey historical writing styles�some of which profoundly influenced subsequent work�as well as how the materials of writing have been used. Most calligraphy is done with pen and ink on paper or parchment, although brushes and chisels are also used for making large letters on various surfaces. Later judgments about how the tip of a pen (usually a quill or reed) was cut, the angle at which it was held, and the formation of individual letters are conjectures based on the evidence of images of people writing, subsequent calligraphic practices, and the letters themselves. Very few artifacts and no treatises on the practice of writing are known to have existed before the 15th century, although instructions and descriptions of quill cutting published in the 16th century probably reflect long-standing practices. Ancient Roman stylesRustic capitals
The Latin and vernacular handwriting of western Europe descends in a nearly unbroken line to the present day from the 1st century ad. The script used throughout the Roman Empire for books and occasionally for formal documents is known as rustic capitals. The pen used to write this script was cut with a broad end and held so that its thickest strokes fell at an oblique, nearly perpendicular angle to the line of writing. As is the case for most formal alphabets, the pen was lifted from the writing surface to make the serifs and other strokes for each single letter. The rustic alphabet consists only of capital, or majuscule, letters, most of which are contained between a single pair of horizontal lines. The letters
Cursive capitals
The business hand of the 1st century, used for correspondence and for most documents, private and official alike, is known as cursive capitals. Here the pen, cut to a narrow point, was held at an oblique angle similar to that used for rustic capitals, but the pen was lifted less often (and the writing was faster). This cursive handling led to new and simpler letter forms such as (two strokes) for
From the 2nd to the early 4th century, parchment was replacing papyrus as the standard writing material for books, and the codex was replacing the roll as their standard form. The evidence that survives from this period, during which biblical and other Christian literature was beginning to be copied extensively, is fragmentary, and its interpretation is still controversial. The main line of development, however, is clear enough. The elaborate letter forms of rustic capitals, with their numerous pen lifts, began to be abandoned, and experiments were made with new book hands in which the simplified letter forms of cursive capitals were written with a broad pen, sometimes held obliquely in the traditional way and sometimes held �straight,� so that its thickest strokes fell at right angles to the line of writing. It was probably the use of a straight pen that produced, for example, the conversion of cursive capital (axis oblique) into the fully minuscule
For the 4th and 5th centuries, the evidence is more abundant, and it is known that two new book hands and a new business hand came into use. The older of the book hands, called uncials (a name given this style by the 17th-century French paleographer Jean Mabillon), was originally written with a square-edged pen, perhaps cut at an oblique angle; but, from the 6th century onward, a pen without an oblique cut seems to have been used, leading to a rounder-looking letter. Occasionally these letters were written with several lifts and manipulations of the pen, which led one paleographer to dub them �artificial� uncials. Although they incorporate several cursive letter forms (, , h) and introduce two forms peculiar to this type of alphabet (, ), uncials generally constitute a capital alphabet similar to Greek capitals of the 4th century, such as those seen in the Codex Sinaiticus.
From the 4th to the early 7th century, most Christian books�biblical, patristic, and liturgical�were written in the uncial script, and even for pagan literature uncial almost entirely superseded rustic capitals. It survived the collapse of the Roman book trade. And, after the 6th century, when the production of all books, pagan as well as Christian, was taken over by the church�notably by the monasteries, such as the Vivarium founded in southern Italy by Cassiodorus, a scholar whose aim was to perpetuate Roman culture, and the houses that observed the Rule of St. Benedict�uncial script survived in many centres, especially for biblical and liturgical texts, down to the 9th century. Thereafter, like rustic capitals, uncials were used only for titles, and they, too, disappeared in the 12th century.
The younger of the two new book hands is called half uncial. This script was less popular than uncials and never broke their monopoly on biblical and liturgical texts, although, like uncial script, half uncial was still being written in the 8th century and even, as a display script, in the 9th century. Half uncial differs from early uncial script in its minuscule appearance; only one letter (
The new business hand of the 4th century and after is known as cursive minuscule. Like cursive capitals, it was written with a pointed pen, but the pen was held more or less straight. It uses basically the same letter forms as half uncials, although the frequency in cursive minuscule of ligatures between letters tends to conceal the fundamental likeness between the two hands.
The letter forms that distinguish cursive minuscule and half uncials from rustic and cursive capitals and from uncials were developed during the obscure period between the 1st and 4th centuries. The question of whether these forms developed in the sphere of the book hands or of the business hands is still undecided, but, whatever their origin, their importance for the subsequent history of European handwriting is paramount. They provided the material on which the Carolingian minuscule, which first appeared in the late 8th century, was based, and that script (including its modifications) dominated Europe until the end of the Middle Ages. Only in one other period were new letter forms evolved, between the 13th and the 15th centuries, in the group of scripts known as Gothic cursives; and the influence of these late innovations was ultimately canceled out, thanks to the revival of Carolingian minuscule in a pure form by the Italian humanists at the beginning of the 15th century.
From the 5th century the relaxation of imperial Roman authority brought on a reassertion and growth of native cultures�that is, wherever the people were not wholly occupied in a savage struggle for mere existence against aggressive tribes migrating across Europe (e.g., Avars, Slavs, and Saxons). The most isolated places, such as the province of Britain, responded strongly to this opportunity and at the same time were able to conserve important elements of Roman civilization. Ireland, which was never under occupation by the legions, offered during Europe�s darkest age comparative peace and shelter for the development of the richest and most original of book styles.
The Insular manuscripts were produced at isolated and inaccessible monasteries. According to tradition, the earliest centre of Christian learning in Ireland was established by St. Patrick (fl. 5th century). A great successor, Columba" class="md-crosslink">St. Columba, or Columcille, whom legend credits with divine scribal powers, founded monastic houses at Derry and Durrow and then journeyed to the Inner Hebrides to found one on the lonely island of Iona in about 563. St. Columban, another Irish missionary, in much the same period was founding monasteries on the Continent: about 590 in Gaul (modern France) the Burgundian centre Luxeuil, from which Corbie in Picardy was organized, and St. Gall in Switzerland and Bobbio in Italy (about 612 to 614). From Iona a daughter house was founded in 635 on St. Cuthbert�s holy isle of Lindisfarne just off the Northumbrian coast of England. To the south the Northumbrian monk, later abbot and saint, Benedict Biscop established the twin monasteries of St. Peter at Wearmouth in 674 and St. Paul at Jarrow in 682. He endowed them with splendid collections of books and pictures gathered during repeated visits to Rome, so that, in the late 7th and early 8th centuries, they constituted the most flourishing centre of Christian scholarship in western Europe and the meeting place of Hiberno-British and continental influences.
For the fine books made in the Anglo-Celtic centres, the majuscular script called Insular half uncial was deemed suitable rather than the pointed, more cursive Irish minuscule used for documents and vernacular texts. There is a high degree of conformity, attesting to their stylistic maturity, among such manuscripts as the Book of Kells (Trinity College, Dublin) and the Lindisfarne Gospels (British Museum, London), individual as they are in detail and ornament. After all, there is room for infinite variation where, in one-quarter of a square inch, 158 interlacements have been traced unerringly�by angels, it was said. The Book of Kells, Codex Cenannensis to paleographers, was probably produced at Iona around 800. It has 339 leaves, 13 by 10 inches (33 by 25 cm) of dignified script in single column, jet black on well-made parchment, through which runs the most spirited and colourful of ornamentation, ranging from the red-dotted outlining of letters, which is as much a feature of the style as the wedge-topped ascenders, to the extravagant full-page initials at the opening of Gospels. The other masterpiece of Anglo-Celtic calligraphy and illumination, the Codex Lindisfarnensis, was written in honour of St. Cuthbert shortly after his death in 687. It displays the same lively inventiveness, the love of fantastic animal and bird forms (zoomorphs), intricate interlacing, and even, rhythmic script, set off by generous margins.
The earliest of all extant manuscripts of the Insular style is the
Besides the proud witness of such books as these to the Anglo-Celtic contribution, there were also the productions of continental centres influenced by St. Columban and his disciples, as well as books mainly in the Roman tradition but carrying the unmistakable sign of Insular influence. For instance, there are three that scholars believe were written in the 7th century at Bobbio (Italy), in the monastery of St. Columban. They are Codex Usserianus Primus, now a treasure of Trinity College, Dublin, and two manuscripts preserved in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, known as Codex Ambrosianus C.26 sup. and Codex Ambrosianus D.23 sup. There is another, Codex Amiatinus (Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Florence), of 1,030 leaves measuring 20 by 13 1/2 inches (51 by 34 cm), made in Northumbria in the 8th century. It is continental Roman in style with no concession to the Insular habit of ornamentation�perhaps because it was designed for presentation to the pope.
Though the Insular minuscule was widely known, the majuscular half uncial was always given the place of honour and the preference for the fine Latin books of the Anglo-Celtic monasteries. Nevertheless, by the 8th century the minuscule was developing into a disciplined book hand, as seen in the copy of Bede�s
The Merovingian (France) and the Visigothic (Spain) are two more varieties of minuscular script that grew out of Latin cursive after the withdrawal of the Roman authority. In the Luxeuil monastery, in Burgundy, the minuscule attained in the 7th century the characteristics of a fine book hand. In the Iberian Peninsula the Visigothic style was in use from at least the 8th to the 12th century. It has the verticality of emphasis that is common to the other hands out of the same cursive background, and its weighted ascenders are carefully topped by flat serifs.
The southern Italian script of the style called Beneventan, nurtured in the motherhouse of the Benedictine Order at Monte Cassino, was the �national� hand that rose to the status of calligraphy and held its position well into the 13th century, an active literary life of more than 500 years. This type of script has a peculiar jerky rhythm and retains individual cursive forms, which, together with the abundance of abbreviations and ligatures, make reading quite difficult.
The literary and ecclesiastical reforms undertaken in the latter part of the 8th century and the early 9th century by order of the Holy Roman emperor Charlemagne set the highest of standards for the making of books throughout his Western empire. The extensive educational program and the production of new authorized versions of the Vulgate, the missal, and other liturgical works led Charlemagne to invite the English cleric Alcuin of York to come to France to oversee the making of these manuscripts. Alcuin first became master of the palace school at Aachen, Ger. (Aix-la-Chapelle), then went to Tours, France, to lead the Abbey of St. Martin.
Scholars have concluded that Alcuin may have been more a text editor and general overseer of the project than inventor of the Carolingian alphabet. He probably selected this particular alphabet from existing manuscripts as the best one to use in copying new manuscripts. The fully developed hand can be seen in books written in Charlemagne�s court around the time of Alcuin�s arrival there in 781 or 782. For example, one of best known of the codices written in the Carolingian script, the Godescalc Gospels, was commissioned by Charlemagne on Oct. 7, 781, and finished a year and a half later by the scribe Godescalc on April 30, 783. Also noteworthy are several other early Carolingian gospel books in which important headings are written in gold uncials; the books, done on purple-dyed skins, are illuminated with miniatures and use Carolingian script for their main text.
The black-letter, or Gothic, style (9th to 15th century)
Carolingian minuscule remained the unrivaled book hand of western Europe through the 9th century, when a trend away from this official imperial standard appeared in some places. For example, in the manuscripts written at Sankt Gallen (Switz.) near the end of the 9th century and during the 10th, scribes tended to compress the letters laterally. They may have found the motion of the pen to be more fluid if they held it with the shaft out to the side rather than pointing back over the right shoulder. With a change of the orientation of the shaft, scribes probably cut the pen�s writing edge obliquely so that it would be parallel to the top of the page to accommodate the slanting position of the shaft. This position produced a perpendicular mark (minim) of maximum width.
By the end of the 12th century this strong vertical stroke was made more prominent as Carolingian letters were made narrower and some curved parts of letters were replaced with angles. The resulting style is called protogothic. It is widely believed that the more compact writing allowed significant economies in time (and thus labour) and materials. In addition, abbreviations, another way to save space, occurred with increasing frequency. Yet book margins remained wide, and the text usually occupied less than half the available area. In books of hours, literary manuscripts, and some religious tomes, these ample spaces were partly filled with decorations made by illuminators; and some manuscripts preserve readers� marginal glosses or annotations.
Especially in northern Europe, a black-letter style of increasing density deepened the colour of the page and imparted to this formal book hand the appearance of woven fabric, giving rise to its generic name of
Paleographers have distinguished four types of black-letter (
There are also cursive forms of black-letter scripts. One such style�used extensively in French vernacular books�is called
Inspired by the 14th-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarch�who is credited with starting the practice of collecting ancient Roman manuscripts, coins, medals, and other artifacts�the literary and philosophical movement called humanism engaged a group of scholars in Florence during the late 14th and early 15th centuries. Through literary and archaeological research they sought to restore what they believed was their lost heritage. Many of the manuscripts they found had been transcribed during the 9th through 12th centuries in Carolingian minuscules with titles in pen-made Roman capitals. The humanists believed mistakenly that these manuscripts originated in the ancient world and therefore that the writing styles in them were the scripts used by the ancient Romans. Reverently, Coluccio Salutati, the late 14th-century chancellor of Florence who followed Petrarch as leader of the movement, and his fellow humanists imitated the predominant old script, which they called
Two prot�g�s of Salutati, Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini and Niccol� Niccoli, are credited with developing the fundamental writing styles of humanism based on the scripts found in Carolingian manuscripts. At the beginning of the 15th century, Poggio Bracciolini, a professional scribe, produced a round, formal humanist book hand that, after refinement by a generation of scribes, served as the prototype for �roman� type fonts. To the minuscules he added a pen-made style of square capitals similar to those seen on early Roman monuments for the majuscules, thereby linking the two disparate scripts.
Later in the 15th century the rage for epigraphic (inscriptional) lettering brought into the field such enthusiasts as Cyriacus of Ancona, Felice Feliciano and Giovanni Giocondo of Verona, and Giovanni Marcanova, Bartolomeo Sanvito, and Andrea Mantegna from Padua; Mantegna, an engraver and painter, became one of the first Renaissance artists to incorporate classical lettering into his artwork. These men compiled their researches into
Feliciano, an antiquary, poet, scribe, printer, and alchemist, was the first person to attempt to demonstrate how monumental Roman capitals were constructed according to geometric rules. In a manuscript made by him between 1458 and 1469 (Vatican Library, Vat. Lat. 6852), Feliciano presents an inscriptional capital Roman alphabet, complete with the shadows formed by v-cut letters, along with rudimentary instructions on making these letters based on geometry. He used a straight edge and compass (devices not used by the ancient Romans), although some of the work is done freehand. Others would later pursue this geometric approach, well into the age of print�one of the best known proponents being the great German painter and printmaker Albrecht D�rer in the early 16th century.
The second influential style of humanistic script appeared in the writings of Poggio�s older friend Niccol� Niccoli, a scholar who was also an accomplished, though not a professional, scribe. His slightly inclined cursive, speedily written with a fairly narrow, somewhat blunt nib, was to inspire the printers� italic type, just as Poggio�s hand led to their roman type. Niccoli�s cursive script was informal and useful, not primarily artistic. It is a rapidly written script that links most letters and shows few pen lifts. Some black-letter mannerism appears in the writing. This early italic is not nearly as condensed as its later descendants; the letters (e.g.,
In 1403 Poggio carried his new script to Rome, where he became papal secretary. Both his and Niccoli�s scripts were devoted to the service of classical literature, but there was a difference: Poggio, the professional notary, used his hand in a way that can be described as calligraphic, while Niccoli used his as a convenient aid to copying. Further differences are seen in the work of the two men: Poggio wrote on fine parchment, took care to make lines end uniformly (justified), and drew elaborate display capitals and initials; Niccoli usually wrote on paper, used the simplest of pen-made Roman capitals for titles, and focused on textual accuracy. An interesting parallel is found in books printed in Italy in the 16th century: grand Renaissance folios were set in fine roman types, while well-edited, inexpensive small books for scholars were set in italic type.
Although printing from movable type displaced many copyists after the middle of the 15th century, it also freed them from the tedious copying of books. (
By the early 16th century the versatile
Sixteenth-century Italians were the first to publish books on the making of letters:
Ludovico degli Arrighi published the first practical manual on writing
In his introduction to
From the 16th through 18th centuries two types of writing books predominated in Europe: the writing manual, which instructed the reader how to make, space, and join letters, as well as, in some books, how to choose paper, cut quills, and make ink; and the copybook, which consisted of pages of writing models to be copied as practice.
In Rome in 1540 Giovanni Battista Palatino published his
The first non-Italian book on chancery was by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator. His
Juan de Yciar was the first in Spain to publish a copybook, the
The italic hand had little effect on publications in 16th-century Germany and Switzerland, where black-letter alphabets predominated. Johann Neud�rffer the Elder was the first German to print a copybook. His
Wolfgang Fugger, a student of Neud�rffer, published his
The first writing books by French, Dutch, and English authors appeared in the second half of the 16th century. Like the German authors, these followed the Italian method of teaching the alphabets. Their books generally featured a rather spiky cursive secretary hand as well as some version of the Italian chancery script. By the time most of them were published (between 1561 and 1575), italic writing had undergone radical changes under the influence of the Vatican scribe Gianfrancesco Cresci.
Cresci published three writing books:
The
Hamon�s early use of metal engraving is generally overlooked in discussions of the printing history of writing books because of the extreme scarcity of his little book. Hamon was arrested in 1569 either for his Protestant religious beliefs, for forging the royal signature, or because he wrote some treasonable verses about the king. In any case, not only was Hamon executed that year, but all of his works were ordered destroyed.
The same year Hamon�s book appeared, the Flemish publisher-printer Christophe Plantin published the
The first copybook published in England,
Likewise, the anonymous
Around the middle of the 16th century,
Toward the end of the 16th century the Italians were losing their dominance in the writing-book market despite the number of titles they produced. Engraving had rapidly become the preferred means of reproducing all sorts of writing, and
The last quarter of the 16th century also marks the emergence of women from their relative obscurity in the field of calligraphy. They had played an important role in the production of manuscripts since the 8th century, when the oldest surviving Roman sacramentary (Vatican Library, Reg. lat. 316) was written out at a convent in Chelles, France, about 750. Nuns and laywomen were responsible for writing and illuminating manuscripts throughout the Middle Ages, but they, like monks and laymen of the time, often remained anonymous.
The first calligraphy by a woman to appear in a printed work was that of Jacquemyne (or Jacomina) Hondius, the sister of the Dutch publisher, cartographer, and calligrapher Jodocus Hondius. Two examples by her were included in the first international calligraphic anthology, the
Another writing mistress of distinction is Marie Presot. Like Beauchesne, she and her husband were French Huguenots, and they settled in Edinburgh about 1574. They set up a school there where her husband, Nicholas Langlois, taught French language and composition and Presot taught writing. A single surviving manuscript by her in the Newberry Library, Chicago, shows a fine mastery of the French secretary and
The growing literacy of the period, promoted by the rise of commerce throughout Europe, encouraged the teaching of writing to women, who were often involved in running their spouse�s business, and several late 16th-century printed copybooks contain examples for women to copy. The earliest writing book published by a woman survives in a unique, incomplete copy in the Newberry Library; it is Marie Pavie�s engraved copybook, which was probably printed in France about 1600. Pavie includes a Cresci-style italic and two forms of French secretary on each page. The scripts are ornately presented and surrounded by pen-drawn calligraphic borders similar to those found in other late-16th-century French writing books.
Maria Strick was a Dutch writing mistress who published four substantial writing books between 1609 and 1624, all engraved by her husband, Hans, who gave up his trade as a shoemaker to work on his wife�s books. Strick ran a French secular school for girls, first in Delft and later in Rotterdam. Her work, as was typical at the time, emphasized formal and informal Dutch secretary scripts and traditional italic writing. Her books demonstrate a mastery of flourishes and decorated initials. In a handwriting competition of 1620, her italic was judged best.
Calligraphy continued to evolve in the 17th century, and there was increasing emphasis on varieties of
In Jan van den Velde�s
Italian writing masters of the 17th century were soon playing catch-up with the Dutch: in 1619 Tomaso Ruinetti published his
In England Edward Cocker, a prolific writing master, mathematician, and engraver who produced more than two dozen writing books, followed the Dutch and Italian lead in flourishing, but as the century wore on the tide was changing. Apparently fashion passed him by, for in his
Cry downe rare Knotts
Whose envy makes them currish
But Art shall shine
And Envie pine
And still my Pen shall flourish.
Also in the late 1650s, the French writing master and secretary to the chamber of King Louis XIV, Louis Barbedor, published an expanded version of his
The works of the late 17th- and early 18th-century English writing masters stand out by their quantity, quality, and influence on modern calligraphy and handwriting. English scribes of the period synthesized the works of 17th-century French and Dutch masters into a style they called round hand. One of the first English copybooks to show this new style is
English writing masters did not hide their debt to continental masters even as they boasted of their own skills. For example, in
English round hand is often mislabeled as copperplate or Spencerian script; the confusion arises from their similarities. All have a steep letter slope to the right (between 30 and 40 degrees), and they all have capitals with broad downstrokes. However, differences can readily be discerned. Round hand has a relatively wide proportion of width to height in its small letters, and they are joined by steeply angled (40�45 degree) hairlines. The script was written with a quill cut to a narrow point with a small square edge on its tip and a slit long enough to allow a certain amount of flexibility when pressure was applied in making downstrokes. Hairlines were extremely fine. The small
Round hand was not an imitation of the fine lines produced by the engraver�s burin, although some modern writers have made that assertion. With few exceptions, engraving was considered a reproductive (as opposed to a creative) art in the 17th and 18th century. Prominent engravers such as John Sturt and George Bickham pointed out that engraving was no match for the pen in freedom or beauty and that the engraver depended on written copy.
Although English writing books continued to include other scripts such as black letter (which they called �German text�), various secretary hands, a slender, delicate �Italian� hand recommended for women, and a rather idiosyncratic hand used for law court records, round hand occupied most of their pages. By about 1725, it was the principal commercial and decorative hand. By mid-century most books showed only round hand and a few varieties of the German text hand; Roman capitals and minuscules were included mainly as display alphabets in titles and text headings. Command of hand was limited to decorating display alphabets or finishing off short lines of writing, and pen-made calligraphic pictures faded from the scene. By this time, flourishing was considered frivolous and unnecessary in business, for which the chief and singular virtue of penmanship was legibility. By the end of the century, writing books from Europe and the United States shifted their focus away from calligraphic qualities and toward the ideal of a legible and easy-to-learn hand.
By the end of the 18th century, as shown in
With the perfection and mass production of the flexible metal pointed pen in the 1820s, calligraphy experienced a slight revival through the efforts of people such as the American Oliver B. Goldsmith, who was an early and strong advocate for the use of metal pens for writing and decoration. His
The revival of calligraphy in Great Britain at the end of the 19th century was part of a broader artistic reaction against the mechanization of manual crafts. About 1870 the English author, socialist, and artist William Morris turned his attention to the ancient practices of scribes and began to experiment with writing. Using quills, he wrote out and illuminated several manuscripts on parchment and paper; he later became interested in printing, and he established the Kelmscott Press in 1891. His inquiries into calligraphy and his patronage of the book arts induced paper and parchment makers, among others, to revive forgotten manufacturing standards, and his study and collection of manuscripts inspired others to pursue calligraphy.
Among those who were indirectly inspired by Morris�s activities was the British calligrapher Edward Johnston, who explored medieval and Renaissance techniques and materials relating to manuscript preparation and writing. Starting with a version of half uncial, Johnston eventually settled on a 10th-century version of English Carolingian as a basic, or �foundational,� hand from which other calligraphic styles could be developed. He became an influential teacher of a generation of type designers and calligraphers; his
A calligraphic renaissance had already begun in Austria and Germany by then, through the efforts of the Austrian royal archivist Rudolf von Larisch, who lectured on lettering and typography in Vienna, and the type designer Rudolf Koch in Offenbach, Ger. The Germanic approaches to calligraphy in the early 20th century were quite distinct from English revivalism, especially in the German writers� inclination to seek inspiration in writing materials. In 1905 von Larisch introduced the concept of the �language of materials� (
Art and architecture schools in Europe and America gradually followed London�s Royal College of Art, where Johnston taught, in offering courses in lettering and calligraphy: these, along with the careful study of sound letter forms, instilled an awareness in students of the rich heritage of the alphabet. Accordingly, type design was taken over from technicians and engineers by lettering and calligraphic artists and scholars, including Stanley Morison, Jan van Krimpen, William Addison Dwiggins, Bruce Rogers, Frederic Goudy, and Hermann Zapf, who designed some of the best typefaces of the 20th century. This calligraphic-based tradition in type design has continued in the computer age with designers such as Charles Bigelow, Matthew Carter, Adrian Frutiger, Kris Holmes, and Sumner Stone, all of whom studied calligraphy before designing typefaces.
Before World War II English and German calligraphic influences came together in the United States. Ernst Detterer, who had studied with Edward Johnston in England in 1913, taught lettering and calligraphy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1921 to 1931. He later became custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing at the Newberry Library in Chicago, where he was instrumental in building up an important collection of historical writing books. In 1941 he initiated a calligraphic study group at the library that included graphic artists and type designers such as R. Hunter Middleton, James Hayes, Ray DaBoll, and Bruce Beck.
George Salter moved to New York City from Germany in 1934 and in 1937 began teaching lettering and calligraphy at Cooper Union, where he inspired many students to enter the world of commercial lettering. He also designed hundreds of book jackets that incorporated his unmistakable calligraphic style and that doubtless influenced the many graphic artists who were exposed to them.
After World War II American interest in calligraphy began to spread beyond the area of graphic design, and both professional and amateur calligraphers were attracted to classes and demonstrations by Arnold Bank, a design professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Lloyd Reynolds, who taught italic handwriting to generations of students at Reed College, and other pioneering designers. Calligraphy was clearly becoming familiar to the general population: in 1947 Paul Standard, a skilled amateur calligrapher, published an article on italic handwriting in the popular
Italic script, based on the styles of Arrighi and Palatino, had already become quite popular in the United Kingdom; in 1952 the Society for Italic Handwriting was founded there by the English calligrapher Alfred Fairbank, a pupil of Graily Hewitt. Fairbank, who was undoubtedly the strongest advocate for the italic hand in the 20th century, published his first manual on learning italic handwriting in 1932, and he continued to publish books and articles on this topic for the rest of his life. In 1954, more than 400 years after its first appearance, Arrighi�s
In 1921 Edward Johnston�s students, and their students, had organized the Society of Scribes and Illuminators, �zealously directed toward the production of books and documents� by hand and the advancement of the crafts of member scribes, gilders, and illuminators. The program of this London-based professional group, which continued in the 21st century, was conducted by means of lectures, publications, and exhibitions, and membership was open to anyone interested in calligraphy. In the late 1960s the preeminent English scribe Donald Jackson went to the United States to give a series of lectures, workshops, and classes. Jackson sparked a renewed interest in calligraphy and illumination on both U.S. coasts, and in 1974 a group of calligraphers and lettering artists formed the first modern American calligraphic organization, the Society of Scribes. Other groups were formed in the 1970s and �80s, and by the end of the century there were calligraphic organizations in nearly every state. These organizations sponsored workshops, classes, lectures, and journals, and they joined together for an annual week-long national calligraphy conference. Other calligraphic revivals began during the last quarter of the 20th century in Canada, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy.
Printing technology played a role in the calligraphic revival of the 1970s. By then photocopiers had become widely available, so that instructional handouts and model sheets were easy to produce. Publishers issued new writing manuals and reprinted some older ones, some in facsimile; several professional journals reproduced commercial and artistic cutting-edge calligraphic work. Fountain pens and fibre-tip markers were manufactured for broad-edged calligraphy, and materials for various styles of writing once again became readily available to calligraphers.
Radical changes in the aesthetics of the art followed the renewed interest in calligraphy in the late 20th century. Some of the younger practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic began to de-emphasize text in favour of letterforms and gesture, moving calligraphy in the direction of contemporary painting and drawing. Especially noteworthy are the works of Denis Brown, Thomas Ingmire, Suzanne Moore, Brody Neuenschwander (whose work appears in many of the films of Peter Greenaway), Eliza Schulte, and Susan Skarsgard. Their work goes well beyond the formal, traditional calligraphy in which they were all trained. These artists and the thousands of amateurs who practice calligraphy have ensured the vitality of contemporary calligraphy.
Many institutions and libraries around the world contain calligraphic manuscripts and printed books, but only a few specialize in such holdings. Noteworthy in the United States are the Hofer Collection in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.; the Plimpton Collection in the Columbia University Library, New York City; the Wing Foundation in the Newberry Library, Chicago; and the Harrison Collection in the San Francisco Public Library. In Europe notable collections are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Ditchling Museum, Sussex, Eng.; the Holburne of Menstrie Museum, Bath, Eng.; and the Klingspor Museum, Offenbach, Ger. Ray Nash Robert Williams
Citation Information
Article Title: Calligraphy
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 22 February 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/art/calligraphy
Access Date: August 13, 2019
Additional Reading
Well-illustrated general references include Leila Avrin,
G.R. Driver,
Annemarie Schimmel,
Dorothy E. Miner, Victor I. Carlson, and P.W. Filby (compilers),
Other useful books include Joyce Irene Whalley,
David P. Becker,
E.G. Turner,
The best short accounts in English are in B.L. Ullman,
Yu-ho Ecke Tseng,
Jean Fran�ois Billeter,
Eung-hyon Kim, �Sang-ko eui Sŏye,� �Koryŏ eui Sŏye,� �Yi-cho eui Sŏye,� and �Hyondae eui Soye,� all in
Yoshiaki Shimizu and John M. Rosenfield,