Antiqua
typefaces are typefaces designed between 1470 and 1600, specifically those by
Nicolas Jenson and the Aldine roman commissioned by
Aldus Manutius and cut by
Francesco Griffo. The
letterforms were based on a synthesis of
Roman inscriptional capitals and
Carolingian writing. Florentine poet
Petrarch was one of the few medieval authors to have touched on the handwriting of his time; in two letters he criticized the current scholastic hand, with its protracted strokes ('
) and exuberant (') letter-forms amusing the eye from a distance, but fatiguing on closer exposure, as if written for other purpose than to be read. For Petrarch the gothic hand violated three principles: writing, he said, should be simple ('
), clear (') and orthographically correct.
Boccaccio was a great admirer of Petrarch; from Boccaccio's immediate circle this post-Petrarchan "semi-gothic" revised hand spread to ''
in Florence, Lombardy and the Veneto. A more thorough reform of handwriting than the Petrarchan compromise was in the offing. The generator of the new style (illustration'') was
Poggio Bracciolini, a tireless pursuer of ancient manuscripts, who developed the new
humanist script in the first decade of the 15th century. The Florentine bookseller
Vespasiano da Bisticci recalled later in the century that Poggio had been a very fine
calligrapher of '''' and had transcribed texts to support himself presumably, as Martin Davies points out before he went to Rome in 1403 to begin his career in the
papal curia.
Berthold Ullman identifies the watershed moment in the development of the new humanistic hand as the youthful Poggio's transcription of
Cicero's
Epistles to Atticus. By the time the
Medici library was catalogued in 1418, almost half the manuscripts were noted as in the ''''. The new script was embraced and developed by the
Florentine humanists and educators
Niccolò de' Niccoli and
Coluccio Salutati. The neat, sloping, humanist
cursive invented by the Florentine humanist de' Niccoli in the 1420s and disseminated through his numerous scholars is usually characterized as essentially a rapid version of the same script. Rhiannon Daniels writes, however, that "this was not humanistic
bookhand written cursively, but a running script written with a very fine pen; a modification of contemporary gothic
chancery script influenced by humanistic bookhand; hence it is sometimes known as ''''". In the
history of Western typography, humanist minuscule gained prominence as a basis for the typesetter's
roman typeface, as it was standardized by
Aldus Manutius, who introduced his revolutionary
italic typeface based on the
chancery hand in
Venice, 1501, and practiced by designer-printers
Nicolas Jenson and
Francesco Griffo, respectively; this is the reason why they are also known as
Venetian types and occasionally as
old style, differentiated from modern styles by the more or less uniform thickness of all strokes and by slanted serifs. Roman type has helped establish the remarkable resistance to change of the modern
Latin alphabet. The term "Antiqua" later came to sometimes be used for
Roman type in general as opposed to
blackletter; in German, it used of serif typefaces in particular. ==Designers==