The Renaissance Book

For the humanists Greek and Latin was very important, because for them, they contained both all the lessons one needed to lead a moral and effective life and the best models for a strong Latin style. They developed a new classical scholarship, that was very strict. With this scholarship, they both corrected and tried to understand the works of antiquity (Greeks and Romans). The republican elites, patrons, who had the power in cities like Florencei Venice and Milan, Ferrara and Urbino hired humanists to teach their children classical morality and to write elegant, classical letters, histories and propaganda.

For example, Lorenzo Medici, who was the ruling elite of Florence after his grandfather and father, was very interested in Greek and Roman classicals. Actually the Greek literature, culture, philosphy, science, art which he tried to expand in his society.

Renaissance illuminated books, which were lighter, whiter and elegant:

Renaissance book bindings:

The Renaissance Book

New humanist writings demanded creating a new type of fonts, that were more legible, secular and elegant. Also these were done on papers apart from parchement and vellum. Besides the need for the condensed gothic typefaces was disappearing.

Page design were becoming lighter, whiter, so white space was making its appearance. With the "revival wave" the artisans started to  observe the past and create better typefaces for the society and spent a lot of time while working on lowercase letter, which did not exist in ancient Rome. Their basis was carolingian scripts, that were changed to match the Roman uppercase letters and to better adopt to Gutenberg's printing.



Aldus Manutius

(1450-1515) He was a humanistic scholar, who devoted himself to publishing the Greek and Roman classics. He usually produced books of small format for scholar at low cost. Moreover, he designed and cut the first complete font of the Greek alphabet and added ligatures or tied letters, which were like conventional signs used by scribes. To save space in Latin texts he had a type designed after the Italian cursive script; which was named as the script of Petrarch. It was the first italic type used in books. The books that were produced by him are called Aldine and bear his mark, which was a dolphin and an anchor. Much of his type was designed by Francesco Griffi (Francesco da Bologna)

Claude Garamond

(1480-1561) was a Parisian publisher and one of the leading type designers of that period. Three of his typefaces were requested for a royally orderes book series by Robert Estienne. Garamond took the handwiritings of  Angelo Vergecio, the King's librarian and his ten years-old pupil, Henri Estienne. Claude Garamond's Roman were created shortly thereafter, that influenced the whole France and beyond. (1540s)

Geoffroy Tory

One of the major printers, who wrote and printed theorethical treatise on the design of Roman capital letters. (1529). He was rewarde by François I, and became the Imprimeur du Roi.

It is important to know that the early type designers' aim was generally to find a relationship between the proportions of the letters and the shape and the dimension of the human body.