Chapter 7

Question 1

Renaissance

Answer 1

• “Revival” or “Rebirth”
• originally used to denote the period that began the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Italy, when 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 world of the Italian humanists are closely bound to an innovative approach to book design

Question 2

Trademark

Answer 2

An emblem designed, in this case, to identify 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

Question 3

Reversed designs

Answer 3

White forms on a solid background

Question 4

Type specimen sheet

Answer 4

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

Question 5

Fleurons

Answer 5

• “printer’s flowers”
• decorative elements cast like type.
• An edition of Ars Moriendi published on April 28, 1478, by Italian printers Goivanni 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

Question 6

Humanism

Answer 6

A philosophy if 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 huma potential and value characterized Renaissance humanism

Question 7

Pocket book

Answer 7

• developed by Aldus Manutius
• a smaller book, made more econimical 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 was achieved

Question 8

Cancelleresa

Answer 8

A slanted handwriting style favored among scholars for its speed and informality

Question 9

Renaissance man

Answer 9

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

Question 10

Headpiece

Answer 10

an ornamental design at the top of a page

Question 11

tailpiece

Answer 11

an ornamental design at the bottom of a page

Question 12

arabesque

Answer 12

a complex, ornate design of intertwined floral, foliate, and geometric figures

Question 13

Imagines Mortis

Answer 13

• “the Dance of Death”
• The procession in which skeletons ot corpses escort the living to their graves was a major theme in the visual arts as wall 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 over Europe

Question 14

bracketing

Answer 14

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

Question 15

Johannes da Spira

Answer 15

• d.1470
• A Mainz goldsmith, was given 5-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

Question 16

Nicholas Jenson

Answer 16

• c. 1420-80
• A master of the Royal Mint of Tours, France, was a highly skilled cutter of dies 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. Jenson’s fame as one of history’s greatest typeface designers and punch cutters rests on the types first used un Eusebius’s De Praeparatione Evangelica (Evangelical Preparation), which presents the full flowering of Roman type designs. 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 letter 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 align more perfectly than those of any other printer of his time.

Question 17

Erhard Ratdolt

Answer 17

• 1442-1528
• Achieved significant design innovations toward the totally printed book. A master printer from Augsburg, Germany, Ratdolt worked in Venice from 1476 til 1486. Collaborating closely with his partneers Bernhard Maler and Peter Leoslein, Ratdolt’s 1476 Calendarium (Record Boo) by Regiomontanus had the first complete title page used o 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 3 sided woodcut border used on the title page of Euclid’s Geometrriae elementa (Elements of Geometry) of 1482

Question 18

Johannes Nicolai de Verona

Answer 18

the printer listed in 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 Militari initiated the fine-line style that became popular in Italian graphic design during the later decades of the 15th century

Question 19

Aldus Manutis

Answer 19

• 1450-1515
• an important humanist and scholar of the Italian Renaissance who established Aldine Press in Venice to realize his vision of publishing the major works of the great thinkers of the Greek and Roman words. Important scholars and skilled technical personnel were recruited to staff Aldine 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 a Dreamor 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 of the pocket book

Question 20

Francesco da Bologna

Answer 20

• Surnamed “Griffo” 1450-1518
• a brilliant typeface designer and punch cutter at Aldine Press. Griffo cut Roman, Greek, Hebrew, and the first italic types for Adline editions. His initial project in Venice was a roman face for De Aetna by Petro Bembo in 1495. Griffo researched pre-Caroline scripts to produce a roman type that was more authentic than Jenson’s designs. This style survived 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.

Question 21

Lodovico degli Arrighi

Answer 21

• d. c.1527
• the Italian master calligrapher, printer, and type designer who created the first of many 16th century writing manuals. His small volume of 1522, entitled La operina de imparare di scrivere littera cancellaresca (The First Writing Manual of the Chancery Hand) was a brief course using excellent examples to teach the cancellaresca

Question 22

Henri Estienne

Answer 22

• 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

Question 23

Simon de Colines

Answer 23

• 1480-1546
• Henri Estiennes foreman, who ran the family business until his stepson, Robert Estienne, was able to take over in 1526

Question 24

Robert Estienne

Answer 24

• 1503-59
• Sone 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

Question 25

Geoffroy Tory

Answer 25

• 1480-1533
• a true renaissance man whose accomplishments ranged from professor, scholar, and translator to poet and author; from publisher, printer, and bookseller to calligrapher, designer, and 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. Troy’s Champ Fleury (Subtitled The art and sience of the proper and true proportions of the attic letters), first published in 1529, was his most important and influential work. In Champ Fluery, Troy 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 Messungare carefully analyzed, and Troy offers instructions in the geometric construction of the 23 letters of the Latin alphabet on background grids of 100 squares. Torys message about the Latin alphabet influenced a generation of French printers and punch cutters, and Tory became the more influential graphic designer of his century

Question 26

Claude Garamond

Answer 26

• 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 types 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 80 years earlier. Garamond’s roman typefaces were designed with such perfection that French printers in the 16th 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

Question 27

Oronce Fine

Answer 27

• 1494-1555
• A mathematics professor and author whose abilities as a graphic artist complemented his scientific publication. In addition to illustrating his own mathematics, geography, and astronomy books, Fine became interested in book ornament and design. He worked closely with printers, notably Simon de Colines, in the design and production of his books. Fine;s mathematical construction of ornaments and the robust clarity of his graphic illustration are the work of an innovative graphic designer

Question 28

Johann Froben

Answer 28

• 1460-1527
• Basel’s leading printer, who attracted the outstanding humanist scholar of the Northern Renaissance, Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1543), to the city. For 8 years, beginning in 1521, Erasmus worked with Forben as author, editor, and advisor on matters of scholarship. Unlike most of his German contemporaries, Forben favored hearty, solid roman types rather than Gothics.

Question 29

Hans Holbein the younger

Answer 29

• 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 the title pages, headpieces, tailpieces, and sets of illustrated initials ranged from the humorous (peasant 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 41 woodcuts illustrating Imagines Mortis (The Dance of Death)

Question 30

Johann Oporinus

Answer 30

• Became Basel’s leading printer. His masterpiece was the enormous 667-page folio De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Construction of the Human Body) 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 corpse under Vesalius’s supervision

Question 31

Jean de Tournes

Answer 31

• 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 when they were joined by Robert Granjon, a Parisian type designer working in Lyons

Question 32

Robert Granjon

Answer 32

• 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 caracterede civilite (characters of civility), a typographic version of the French secretarial writing style then in vogue. Due to its poor legibility, civilite 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.

Question 33

Christophe Plantin

Answer 33

• 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

Question 34

Stephen Daye

Answer 34

• c.1594-1668
• A British locksmith who brought printing to the 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 Whole Book of Psalmes (now called The Bay Psalm Book) of 1640

Question 35

Christoffel van Dyck

Answer 35

A Dutch designer and punch cutter whose types, which had stubby serifs with heavy bracketing and fairly stout hairline elements, 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 thick and thins of modern-style types unfortunately led the Harlem foundry that owned them to melt them down to reuse the metal