Notes on the rotunda types of the Renaissance
They were the stock type for theological, legal and scholastic texts all over Europe, including Germany. Until the reformation marked their decline
Rather than an article, this is a collection of notes made over recent months and years while studying 15th-century Venetian romans. During my research I crossed paths with rotunda types many times, and I always ignored them, limiting my relationship with them to some notes jotted down every now and then. I acquired a general knowledge of rotunda and its development, necessary for a brief exposition in my research, but I did not investigate any printed rotunda types, not even Jenson’s. Then, last summer, one night I started drawing letters on screen from some enlargements of Jenson’s rotundas I had on my laptop. Those images were from photos I took some years earlier but I had never looked at the letterforms in detail. I fell in love with them immediately, and as a tribute to this love (and to amend my rude behaviour of ignoring them for so long) I designed a revival of Jenson’s first rotunda (106G), which was released some weeks ago with the name Rotunda Veneta. Along with designing letters, I did some further research into rotunda types, especially those of Jenson. The main information is gathered below, together with a general discussion on the development of rotunda script. Though I hope to get back to it one day, I shall not be pursuing this research in the near future.
1. A brief overview of gothic scripts
During the 12th century in north-east France the calligraphic fashion of reducing the curves of letters to angles and straight strokes reached maturity. It was the beginning of a new style of Latin script that had slowly developed from the Carolingian minuscule through a modification of the ductus. Today it is known as ‘gothic’ — though it had nothing to do with the Goths, who had disappeared many centuries earlier. In the following two centuries this calligraphic fashion developed into organised, regulated scripts, displaying styles of letters that differ according to their geographical origins and to the kind of document the script was employed in — for instance, book scripts are distinguishable from documentary scripts. Gothic is an umbrella term that refers to all these scripts.
To clarify the origin of the term ‘gothic’, despite what is normally believed it seems that the 15th-century Italian humanists were not at all dismissive of the styles that today we Europeans call gothic. As noted by Casamassima [‘Litterae Gothicae’ p. 143], with ‘gothic script’ humanists originally referred to the cursive styles that were developed before or outside the Carolingian reform — which were very hard for them to read — and the term included neither rotunda nor textura. In the 15th century these latter styles were called ‘modern letters’, in contrast with ‘antique letters’, the term used for humanistic script. They would have been included among the ‘disgraceful gothic scripts’ by later generations of humanists — like Vasari — who considered them to be barbaric when compared with humanistic script.
Focusing on book scripts, palaeographers distinguish between northern textualis (whose best-known expression is textura) and southern textualis, or rotunda. Textura was the style of northern Europe and rotunda was standard in the Mediterranean countries — Italy, Spain and southern France. They both reached their full maturity some time in the late 13th or early 14th century and they soon acquired a fixity of shape. They were codified, taught and meticulously applied; these styles of script changed very little over the next two centuries when printing with moveable type was introduced in Europe. [Cencetti, pp. 205–224; Drogin, pp. 59–64; Bischoff, pp. 127–136; Derolez, pp. 72–122]
1.1. A focus on southern textualis, alias rotunda
An early expression of rotunda was the so called Littera Bononiensis, a hand developed at Bologna University and soon employed at the University of Padua and elsewhere in northern Italy. Cencetti says that its definitive morphology came around 1250. At the time Bologna was the major European centre of manuscript production for works of canon and civil law and it is noteworthy that as many as 139 scribes were recorded in Bologna just for the years 1265–1268. Canon and civil law were subjects that had to be mastered by ecclesiastics, notaries and anyone in charge of public offices all over Europe; thus rotunda script was well-known in northern Europe since the 13th century [Cencetti, pp. 218–220].
From a morphological point of view, rotunda shows important differences from textura. They both display bold letters, with short ascenders and descenders and a high contrast between thick and thin strokes (‘shading’, to use the palaeographer’s term). But unlike textura, rotunda letters can be rather wide — they lack textura’s compactness — and have curves in the bowls (b, c, d, e, h, o, p, q and s), though some angularity is often found in letters a and g. Finally, in rotunda there is no sign of the typical gothic treatment of the feet of the letters, the diamond-shaped terminals that are found at the baseline of textura letters. Cencetti acknowledged this difference when he wrote that there was no proper gothic script in Italy, as much as there was no real Gothic architecture; the fancy and vigorous gothic of the great northern cathedrals is found nowhere south of the Alps [Derolez, pp. 102–103; Cencetti, p. 213].
Though this discussion is focussed on minuscules, a side glance at the majuscules of gothic scripts shows that things are not so simple. Derolez noted that our knowledge of gothic majuscules is close to zero and apart from Cencetti’s useful notes, literature on the subject is almost non-existent. Gothic majuscules can be seen as a new alphabet developed mainly from Uncial script (D, E, H, M U), but also from minuscule shapes (N) and sometimes from Roman capitals. We see an exaggeration of curves, swellings, doubled strokes and complementary strokes that became more and more complex over time. From the end of the 13th century this style also had frequent inscriptional application, indeed it is the subject of a chapter in Nicolete Gray’s History of lettering where many striking examples are shown [Derolez, p. 183; Cencetti, p. 209; Gray, pp. 109–121].
After the spread of printing, in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, rotunda coexisted with the new styles of humanistic script, although they were employed by culturally- and socially-distinct groups of people. One of the most peculiar and less known calligraphic manuals of the 16th century, Sigismondo Fanti’s Theorica et pratica de modo scribendi (Venice, 1514), displays the geometric construction of rotunda minuscules according to geometry. For the first time, the geometric diagrams that had already been seen in the constructions of Roman capitals (as in the treatises of Feliciano, Moyllus and Pacioli) are applied to the graphic tradition of the late Middle Ages. According to Casamassima, these diagrams became the model for writing rotunda for the rest of the 16th century. Rotunda script continued to be used in Italy until the 17th century, mainly for liturgical texts, like graduals and chorals, where it was written in big letters. Indeed, among the writing styles he listed in his Il perfetto scrittore (Rome, c. 1571), Gianfrancesco Cresci also included rotunda and called it ‘ecclesiastica’ (ecclesiastical) [Casamassima, pp. 11, 23–24; Mosley, p. 134].
2. The first rotunda types in 15th-century Italy
As happened elsewhere in Europe, when Gutenberg’s invention came to Italy printers set their books in types that closely imitated the local manuscript models. In 15th-century Italy the most popular book hand was still rotunda, but its recent competitor, the humanistic script, was preferred by the Italian political and cultural elite — people who, according to early printers, represented the biggest group of their possible customers.
Although some rotunda types were cut earlier, it was only from the mid-1470s onwards that Italian printers employed rotundas on a regular basis, and for some decades rotunda types were used more often than romans. There is no study on the matter and from the current state of data we cannot compute how many editions were printed in roman and how many in rotunda. However the archive of the Typenrepertorium, which lists all the founts of type found in 15th-century books, records 823 rotunda types and 415 romans employed in Venice. In other words almost two thirds of the founts employed in the extant Venetian editions are rotunda.
The earliest known rotunda type is the big face, suitable for headings and titles, employed by Ulrich Han in Rome from 1467 onwards (Han 150G, c. 21 pt). The earliest book set entirely in rotunda was a treatise on canon law printed by Vindelinus de Spira in 1471, Panormitanus’s Lectura super primo et secundo Decretalium. The text was set in Spira 99G (14 pt), the earliest known rotunda type for text, while the bigger Spira 200G (c. 28 pt) was used for headlines. Vindelinus had the right intuition: notaries and ecclesiastics who had to master civil and canon law had been used to reading books written in rotunda script for centuries. But in 1470–1473 some printers in Venice — including Spira himself — issued legal treatises in roman, the only type that was available at their presses. It was a miscalculation of the taste of the readers: evidently roman type was not what readers of legal books preferred because after 1474 legal textbooks or treatises were set in rotunda type.
It seems that after a few enthusiastic and confused early years, around the mid-1470s, the printers’ awareness of the market sharpened: probably — as Petrucci suggests — they looked more closely at the Italian book tradition which had already established different graphic models for each literary genre long before printing [Petrucci, pp. 144–145]. From that moment onwards, at least in Venice, the subject of the books defined its graphical aspect, notably the type in which the book was set. We have mentioned legal books, but in the following decades also religious (bibles, sermons, psalters, theological and devotional literature), scientific (including Aristotle and the scholastic philosophers) and many vernacular works were normally printed in rotunda type.
Vindelinus employed his Spira 99G in a dozen extant editions, but according to Carter this type was cut ‘with a somewhat uncertain hand and its capitals were extravagantly ornamental’. I am not sure about the extravagance of the capitals but Carter was right about the uncertain appearance: there is something about this type that just does not work; moreover it is somewhat too light for the standards of written rotunda [Carter, p. 50].
After Han’s and Vindelinus’s types, in the years 1472–73 another five rotundas appeared in Italian editions: Riessinger 180G (Naples, 1471), Schriber 1:105/106G (Venice, 1472), Lavagna 112G (Milan, 1472), Renner 75G (Venice, 1473) and Cremonensis 79G, (Venice, 1473). Schriber and Cremonensis are found only in one edition each, which for the former has survived in a single copy held by the Treviso public library: a booklet of 16 pages displaying Ippolito e Leonora, a popular novella of the time. No reproduction is available of these two types, but I was able to find some decent images of the others. These images do give a reasonable idea of their appearance, but are not good enough to allow full appreciation of letterform details.
Spira 99G is not the only one among these early types that was cut with an uncertain hand — to repeat Carter. Apart from Han’s, all the other types generally display letterforms with inconsistent proportions and uneven textures on the page. Han’s type, that Carter calls ‘a bold Great Primer suitable for headings’ shows some well-balanced letterforms.
Then, in June 1474 Nicolas Jenson published the Decretum Gratiani, the first of many legal treatises he was to print in the following years. It was set in his brand new rotunda types.
2.1. The first two sizes of Jenson’s rotunda
Martin Lowry is sure that Jenson spent the previous year, 1473, when he published just one edition, planning the renovation of his firm and cutting punches for the two new sizes of rotunda types, that today we call 106G (15 pt) and 84G (c. 12 pt), the former for text and the latter for commentary [Lowry]. Jenson was able to renovate his company: first he associated with two German merchants — Johannes Rauchfass and Peter Ugelheimer — who helped him establish a wide and strong distribution network, and then he turned his production from classics to legal and religious editions. This change in editorial strategy demanded new type, and Jenson introduced what Carter called an ‘expert and definitive typographical form’ for rotunda type, at least in the lowercase.
The high aesthetic value of these two types is clear at a first glance, even though modern eyes are unfamiliar with rotunda. Jenson was able to reproduce the artificial perfection of the best rotunda hands, with their harmonious collection of curves, angles, thick strokes and very thin connections. The rhythmic alternation of bold strokes and hairlines produces a harmonious pattern on the page, a woven carpet in the best tradition of gothic calligraphy.
Jenson followed the letterforms that had been established in the traditional rotunda script with two small differences. (1) Instead of the uncial d with curved ascender, which was the common shape of d in gothic types, he employed almost exclusively lowercase d with straight ascenders, which was used less frequently elsewhere. (2) Jenson did not include the ligatures bo, oc, po. This is another feature of gothic script: when two adjacent letters show bowls facing each other, the two letters are written so tight that the bowls overlap. Unlike all the previous rotunda types, Jenson did not feel a need to cut new punches and strike new matrices for these pairs of letters, which in type do not appear as harmonious as they can be in calligraphy. This could be another consequence of the tendency to simplify and rationalise the character set that Lotte Hellinga sees as the main technological improvement after the very first printers of the 1450s and 1460s, with Jenson acting as an innovator [Hellinga, pp. 41–43].
The design of the two types is essentially the same, with the main difference that the lowercase letters of 84G are narrower and display a smaller x-height than those of 106G, despite their smaller body. This surprises us because we are used to the opposite: in roman types a smaller body leads to wider letterforms and a bigger x-height, to compensate for the difference in size with larger bodies. Indeed we also find these characteristics in the roman types for commentaries cut in the same early years in Venice — which are wider and with much bigger x-heights than the types for texts. But this is not the case in rotundas used for commentaries; and the reason for this is that Jenson followed the manuscript tradition of rotunda commentaries, which were written with letters that were narrower than those of the texts, despite their smaller size.
The uppercase of Jenson’s two rotundas displays the same masterful design; with their disposition of strokes and swellings and curves which create new counters, Jenson’s capitals match the density of the lowercase letters, as in the best tradition of gothic calligraphy. There are some small differences between the two types: in 84G the round letters (C, E, O, Q) display a corner in the lower-left side of the letterform, as much as M and T, while R is simplified; finally in 84G we do not find the small diamond strokes that in 106G are seen inside the big counters (A, N, P, V). It seems that these differences are design choices linked to the smaller size of 84G: indeed the zigzag, the stroke twisting on itself, inside the round capitals of 106G (which creates a tiny counter) would not have worked at a smaller size, thus the decision to design an angle in order to break the roundness of the letters and to add some density in that area. The same goes for the diamond strokes of 106G that are not needed in the smaller counters of 84G. However, both these types consist of letterforms that are not much decorated, their design is generally simpler, with fewer strokes than the average gothic capitals of the time.
According to some of the most respected experts in the field these two types soon became models for many punchcutters. Throughout the volumes of BMC curated by Scholderer, we find several types recorded as ‘one of the innumerable imitations’ of Jenson’s first or second rotunda, while A. F. Johnson noted that ‘in 15th-century typography Jenson’s rotundas had a much wider vogue than his roman.’ [p. 17]. Indeed from my superficial scan of 15th-century rotundas, it seems clear that many types in Venice, Italy and all around Europe were modelled on Jenson’s letterforms. Jenson is known today for the quality of his roman type — it is not an exaggeration to call it the archetype of every subsequent roman, as I discussed in another article — but his peers in the 15th century probably admired him more for his rotundas.
2.2. Three more sizes of Jenson’s rotunda
In the following years Jenson equipped his firm with three other rotunda types. In 1476 he introduced another type for commentaries, called 93Ga (c. 13 pt), to replace his 84G, which was then cast down to 75 mm for 20 lines — 10.5 pt — and used a few more times in the years that followed. The design of the lowercase is basically the same, the size is slightly bigger and the letters are narrower, while the capitals are different. They display a more complex design, with double strokes, oblique thin lines to cover the bigger counters and other features (see for instance letter I), and they are higher than the lowercase ascenders. Thus, the lowercase of 93Ga was cast on a bigger body than what it actually required; indeed on the printed pages, this type shows some interlinear space that makes it more comfortable to read, especially when the columns of commentary are wide. This interlinear space was not added as leading during composition, it was included in the body of the type to fit the big capitals.
In 1477 Jenson introduced his big size of rotunda for titles, 150G (21 pt). Substantially it follows the same design as the others in the lowercase (though this is Jenson’s only type that regularly displays uncial d in place of lowercase d), while the capitals match those of 93Ga, with a more complex construction and a profusion of small details — as a result of the bigger size. The capitals are rather wide, proportionally much wider than the other sizes of Jenson’s rotundas. This is another custom of gothic script (established long before printing) that today looks bizzarre to us, like condensing letterforms in smaller sizes as seen above.
Finally, in 1478 Jenson introduced another type for texts which would have replaced 106G, again following the same design in the lowercase, while the capitals are another copy of those of 93Ga, on a bigger body. But the size is not much bigger, because this new type for text was also cast at 93 mm for 20 lines — confusingly called 93Gb by BMC. Compared to 93Ga (introduced two years earlier), this type has a bigger lowercase with a much bigger x-height — in proportion to the body size. Thus, despite being cast on the same body, 93Gb appears bigger on the printed page.
This might have been due to its first (known) application, as Scholderer suggests: a 1478 bible where the two types were used together in the same lines — unfortunately only a very bad reproduction of this edition is available. However, a year later Jenson employed 93Gb and 93Ga to set (respectively) text and commentary of some editions, and he probably found that such a correspondence in the body of text and commentary made the composition of pages easier and faster. A rationalisation of the compositors’ work — perhaps found by coincidence, if Scholderer’s supposition is right.
This brief examination shows how Jenson was able to keep a strong design consistency among his five rotundas. These show the same lowercase design — with differences between sizes (titles, text and commentary) that affect the design parameters of the letterforms (width, weight, x-height) and not their shape — while the uppercase follows two distinct designs — although the basic skeleton of the letters is often the same. A first simplified version of gothic capitals can be seen in 106G and 84G and a more complex design in the three types that followed.
After a cursory look at the geographical dissemination of Jenson’s rotundas, I have found that from 1474 onwards types that look very similar (in the lowercase) to Jenson’s 106G and 84G are soon found everywhere. The few dozen types I have checked were all close imitations of Jenson’s and not types originating from his punches. Albeit with insufficient evidence for a hypothesis, I suspect that after 1474 and the introduction of his rotundas, Jenson understood the importance of his new brand identity, i.e. the types and typography of his books. He did not sell his rotundas as he had done with his roman type in the early 1470s. Those were different times. In the second half of the 1470s Jenson was an established entrepreneur, snugly comfortable in high-level political circles (he was also appointed Count Palatine by pope Sixtus IV!) and he had no need to sell type anymore.
3. The spread of rotunda types
After 1474 rotundas soon spread on the market. In the following two years, just in Venice, more than 15 distinct new rotunda types of different sizes appeared in printed books. And to put this proportionally, in the same time span no more than 8 new romans were introduced. Johannes de Colonia (the only printing office able to compete with Jenson) printed nearly all his editions in rotunda, employing at least 12 distinct types before 1480. He revived the two rotundas of Vindelinus de Spira — whose company he took over — and added new sizes, following a similar style of letterforms for some of them. Franciscus Renner, who was the first in Venice to specialise in religious and liturgical books, printed nearly all his editions after 1474 in rotunda, of which he was equipped with at least seven distinct types of different sizes.
The type stocks of the main firms of Venice grew considerably with the introduction of rotundas; and this makes a stark contrast with the pioneering years of the early 1470s when Jenson and the biggest printing offices had to make do with just one roman type.
However, rotunda types crossed the Alps very early and the first known example outside Italy is the type measuring 98 mm for 20 lines (c. 14 pt) employed at the press of Johann Koelhoff in Cologne. In 1472 Koelhoff started using his 98G, which seems to have been cut in imitation of Spira’s type. Furthermore Koelhoff 175Ga, appeared in 1476 and shares similarities with the type for headlines, Spira 200G. Koelhoff employed other rotundas in the following years, but he was not alone in this. In the 1470s we find rotundas in the type stock of several German presses such as Lukas Brandis in Lübeck (100G and 118G), Anton Koberger (110Ga and 160G) and Johann Sensenschmidt (150G and 115G) in Nuremberg, Peter Drach in Speyer (130G), Johann Zainer in Ulm (136G and 96Gb), Johann Amerbach in Basel (81G, 185G and 92Ga), Georg Reyser in Würzburg (112Ga and 180G) and Albrecht Kunne in Memmingen (82G and 115G). In the same years we also find rotundas at the press of Pasquier Bonhomme in Paris (74G and 74G*) and in Lyon at Nicolaus Philippi & Marcus Reinhart’s (92G, 72G and 121G).
3.1. Two rotunda types in the Low Countries
A rotunda type is also found from 1473 onwards in the Low Countries, at the press of Johannes of Westfalia and Dirk Martens (89G). According to Dutch historians it was cast in matrices struck with the punches of Cremonensis 79G, one of the Venetian rotundas mentioned above which predated Jenson’s. A type deriving from the same punches is also found in Padua at the press of Albertus de Stendal. However I must mention that I’m reporting all this without assessment; I have not been able to access these types so I cannot judge whether Westfalia’s type was actually acquired in Venice or was a close imitation, perhaps cut by some Dutch punchcutter. I would not be surprised to find out that Westfalia employed an imitation, because his roman type 120R closely imitates a roman type of Venetian origin, as I discussed in another article.
The printers were well aware of the importance of using a type manufactured in Venice, as they mentioned it in their colophons. For instance, in the colophon of an edition printed alone, after his partnership dissolved, Dirk Martens wrote: ‘Hoc opus impressi Martins Theodoricus Alosti. Qui uenetum scita flandrensibus affero cuncta’. This sentence in obscure Renaissance Latin is anything but clear, however many historians have interpreted it as Martens boasting of having brought all the knowledge of the Venetians to the Flemings. Before the end of 1474 Westfalia moved to the university city of Louvain where he started a prolific printing office (169 editions are recorded in ISTC), and in the colophon of one of his early editions he called the type ‘littera vera modernata, abscissa et formata’ (a true modern (= gothic) type, broken and made up of many strokes). In 1475 Westfalia added a new rotunda (118G) to his stock of types, which bears strong similarities with Jenson 106G [HTP, pp. 15–16]. I am not sure this type really derives from the same Jenson punches, and it would be unsafe to claim anything before comparing enlargements of letters from the printed types.
According to Lotte Hellinga, who is the most respected expert on early Dutch printing today, these Venetian types were an ‘exceptionally well-judged investment’ for Westfalia because he used them in no less than 157 editions. In the monumental work on Dutch incunabula she published with her husband in the 1960s known as HTP, Hellinga called the rotunda style of type ‘venetica’, in tribute to the original term employed by Dutch and German printers: ‘litterae Venetae’ (Venetian letters).
3.2. Ratdolt and the spread after the 1480s
In the 1480s the number of presses that used rotunda types grew exponentially all over Europe. An important contribution to the spread of rotunda was provided by Erhard Ratdolt, one of the most intriguing characters of the early decades of printing — although little is known of him and his work. In Venice in 1476 he started printing with two German partners and in 1480 opened a new office on his own; in 1486 Ratdolt returned to his native Augsburg, where he printed hundreds of admired editions — mainly religious and scientific works — well into the 16th century. From Venice he brought with him a rich collection of rotunda types, as we can see from his type specimen, the earliest known item of this kind. Ratdolt’s specimen (probably printed just before leaving Venice), has survived in a unique copy held today by the Bavarian State Library in Munich. It displays 10 rotunda types of different sizes, three romans and a Greek. It seems that in Augsburg Ratdolt employed almost exclusively rotunda types, and the admiration he gained from contemporaries was probably another cause for the spread of this style of type in Germany and northern Europe.
While it was rarely used to print vernacular languages, from the early 1480s onwards rotunda was employed to set Latin texts throughout Europe. Due to this fast spread, Carter noted that printers must have liked this style. By the early 1490s, it had become the ‘stock type in Europe for theological, legal and scholastic texts’ [A.F. Johnson, p. 17], and from the extant books it seems that up to around 1520 rotunda was the most common style of type all over Europe, including Germany. There is no precise data for it, but the second part of Robert Proctor’s Index of the early printed books (1903), that is entirely on German production between 1501–1520, is full of rotunda types — called ‘church types’. This collection should give an idea of the variety of type used in those decades, though it is related only to books held by the British Library. Proctor displays 27 pages of facsimiles (portions of original pages reproduced in collotype) comprising 33 rotundas, 12 schwabachers, 12 romans (including two big-size capitals for titles), 10 texturas, two frakturs and two italics.
Rotunda was also widely employed in Italy in the first and second decades of the 16th century, despite the possibility of some early signs of decline. For instance, from the 1490s onwards vernacular literature was printed more often in roman type — and later in the new style of chancery italic — rather than in rotunda.
4. The decline of rotunda types
The popularity of rotundas declined after 1520 and in a few decades they vanished from European books, save for Latin liturgical editions, where they were employed until the 17th century — and even later in Italy. Rotundas were also used for legal editions for some time, though the use of roman and italic types became more and more common from around 1550 onwards. It would be interesting to check Italian 17th- and 18th-century liturgical books set in rotunda, to determine the age of the types displayed because the production of rotunda types in Italy and elsewhere stopped during the 16th century — probably before 1550 (to my knowledge, the latest known rotunda type to be produced was Hendrik van den Keere’s ‘Canon d’Espaigne’ (c. 47 pt), cut in the early 1570s for Plantin, who had received the order for a monumental antiphonarium to be used in Spain — the book was never printed but the type was shown in Plantin’s specimen of c. 1585 and its punches and matrices are still at the Plantin-Moretus Museum [Vervliet, pp. 178–179]). The earliest known Italian type specimen, printed by Alessandro & Vittorio Benacci in Bologna between 1587–1591 (a single sheet with a printed area of 42×30 cm, has survived in a single copy now at the Amsterdam University Library), displays only one rotunda type, but seven romans, five italics and one Greek. The rotunda is obviously of big size, for liturgical publications, and it looks quite worn compared with the other types of the specimen. Moreover, some rotunda types survived in the collection of the Vatican press, in Rome, as we can see from a catalogue of all the punches and matrices compiled in 1911, after the material from the Propaganda Fide had been brought to the Vatican. This catalogue displays smoke proofs of the punches, and James Mosley made photocopies of it that are now in the St Bride Library. The last pages of the catalogue display, in a rather confused manner, some rotunda types of different sizes — all of them big — gathered under the name of ‘Corale gotico vaticano’. Some punches —such as ligatures de and po — seem to indicate that these sets are very old and were possibly cut in the early 16th century — if not earlier; indeed these ligatures soon went out of use and almost none of them are found in Proctor’s facsimiles.
4.1. The vanishing of rotunda in the 16th century
The reason why rotunda disappeared so quickly is quite a mystery. I read somewhere that in Italy its disappearance was a consequence of the Council of Trent (1560s), where the Catholic Church reviewed its brand and its practices in reaction to the Protestant Reformation. I have not been able to locate the source, however the claim is incorrect because there are several examples of Tridentine Missals (and other liturgical publications revised after the council) printed in rotunda type towards the end of the century.
However, outside the liturgical field, in Italy rotunda was put to rest during the 1520s and 1530s and was replaced by roman type and, notably, by chancery italic, which enjoyed an astonishing popularity during those decades — as a type of its own, not linked to any specific roman.
In Germany it went out of fashion at the same time, probably also due to the increasing production of books in the German language, where the style of type had already been schwabacher. Rotunda was employed for Latin texts and it was soon replaced by roman type — perhaps because after the reform, in northern Europe rotunda was recognised as the style of type of the ‘abominable’ Roman Church. I have discussed these matters with my friend and colleague Dan Reynolds who offered some speculation that I’d like to quote:
Just as Jenson understood the importance of brand identity for the books he printed, Martin Luther and the printers in Wittenberg developed a particular appearance for many of the first editions of his publications. [Andrew Pettegree gives a detailed narrative of this in Brand Luther, New York: Penguin Press (2015)] Luther wrote in both Latin and his vernacular German. When he began publishing, his printers likely only had a limited variety of typefaces available, and rotundas can be found in his early publications. By the 1530s, however, Luther seems to me to have instigated a typographic break with Rome, as well as an ecclesiastic one. What could be described as the Luther ‘house style’ came to rely primarily on schwabacher faces. Despite its role in humanist printing, roman type in Germany came to be associated with Latin and the Romance languages, but also with the hierarchy of the Church in Italy and with the Catholic monarchies. Luther did not use roman type in a positive way, and I suspect that he may have considered rotunda types too Italian and Catholic as well. The rapid decline of rotunda types in German printing corresponds with the Protestant Reformation. While this does not mean that the Reformation was responsible for the disappearance of rotunda types in print per se, it definitely played some role in it. [Dan Reynolds, email exchange, 23 May 2020]
Final notes
Unfortunately, due to the current state of things, I cannot offer better images and a better type analysis than the above. These notes were put together in the final weeks of the Italian lockdown and, although now life is slowly getting back to normal, it is not clear yet whenever I am allowed again to walk into a public library and take photos of books. The photographic material I have gathered is not at all complete, not even for Jenson. Indeed I have only taken a few enlargements of his 93Ga and none of 93Gb and 150G, thus any detailed comparison between these types is not yet possible.
In these notes I have made generous use of images taken from the internet. I must say that the collections of digitised incunabula available today would have been unthinkable 10 or even 5 years ago. Today thousands of incunabula (and hundreds of thousands of editions from different periods) have been scanned and published online as high-resolution images by many European and American institutions. This is a great asset for researchers, an asset that is expanding every day.
Bibliography
Bischoff, Bernhard. Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Casamassima, Emanuele. ‘Litterae Gothicae. Note per la storia della riforma grafica umanistica’, La Bibliofilía, 62 (1960), pp. 109–143.
Casamassima, Emanuele. Trattati di scrittura del Cinquecento italiano (Milano: il Polifilo, 1966).
Cencetti, Giorgio. Lineamenti di storia della scrittura latina (Bologna: Pàtron, 1954)
Crous, Ernst & Joachim Kirchner. Die Gotischen Schriftarten (Leipzig: Verlegt bei Klink-hardt & Biermann, 1928).
Derolez, Albert. The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books from the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Drogin, Marc. Medieval Calligraphy: Its History and Technique (New York: Dover Publications, 1980).
Hellinga, Lotte. ‘Nicolas Jenson, Peter Schoeffer and the Development of Printing Types’ in Hellinga, Incunabula in Transit (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
Hellinga, Wytze G. & Lotte. The Fifteenth-Century Printing Types of the Low Countries (HTP). Translated from the Dutch by D. A. S. Reid. (Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, 1966).
Johnson, A. F. ‘Gothic types’ in Johnson, Type design. 3rd edition (Norwich: Jarrold and sons, 1966), pp. 5–36.
Mazal, Otto. Paläographie und Paläotypie: Zur Geschichte der Schrift im Zeitalter der Inkunabeln (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann Verlag, 1984).
Petrucci, Armando. ‘Alle origini del libro moderno: Libri da banco, libri da bisaccia, libretti da mano’ in Petrucci, Libri, scrittura e pubblico nel rinascimento (Bari: Laterza, 1979), pp. 144–145.
Scholderer, Victor (ed.). Catalogue of books printed in the XVth century now in the British Museum (BMC) pt. 5. Venice (London: Printed by order of the Trustees, 1924).
Scholderer, Victor. ‘Printing at Venice to the End of 1481’ in Scholderer, Fifty Essays in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Bibliography (Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, 1966), pp. 74–89.
Steinmann, Martin. ‘Von der Handschrift zur Druckschrift der Renaissance’ in Barbara Tiemann (ed.), Die Buchkultur im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert. Vol. 1 (Hamburg: Maximilian-Gesellschaft, 1995), pp. 203–264.
Vervliet, Hendrik D.L. Sixteenth century printing types of the Low Countries (Amsterdam: Hes & De Graaf, 1968).
Sources of images
Several collections of high-resolution images of incunabula have been accessed, the biggest of which has been gathered by the Munich Digitalisation Centre (MDZ) of the Bavarian State Library of Munich.
16th-century German books are found at the Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts (Bibliography of Books Printed in the German Speaking Countries of the Sixteenth Century) abbreviated VD16.
A useful source for manuscripts, that cover several centuries, is Fragmentarium (Digital Research Laboratory for Medieval Manuscript Fragments), an online database of fragments of medieval manuscripts made with the contributions of major libraries and collections — including the British Library, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Bavarian State Library, Harvard, Yale and the Vatican.
Another resource is the database of digitised manuscripts of the British Library.
