The Renaissance

is the term used to describe the development of Western civilization that marked the transition from
medieval to modern times.

In the 12th cent. a rediscovery of Greek and Roman literature occurred across Europe that eventually
led to the development of the humanist movement in the 14th century. In addition to emphasizing
Greek and Latin scholarship, humanists believed that each individual had significance within society.
The growth of an interest in humanism led to the changes in the arts and sciences that form common
conceptions of the Renaissance.

The 14th cent. through the 16th cent. was a period of economic flux in Europe; the most extensive
changes took place in Italy. After the death of Frederick II in 1250, emperors lost power in Italy and
throughout Europe; none of Frederick's successors equaled him. Power fell instead into the hands of
various popes; after the Great Schism (1378–1415; see Schism, Great), when three popes held power
simultaneously, control returned to secular rulers. During the Renaissance small Italian republics
developed into despotisms as the centers of power moved from the landed estates to the cities.
Europe itself slowly developed into groups of self-sufficient compartments. At the height of the
Renaissance there were five major city-states in Italy: the combined state of Naples and Sicily, the
Papal State, Florence, Milan, and Venice. Italy's economic growth is best exemplified in the
development of strong banks, most notably the Medici bank of Florence. England, France, and Spain
also began to develop economically based class systems.
Renaisance Painting: Sandro Boticelli (1445 - 1510)

Renaisance Painting: Michelangelo Caravaggio (1571 - 1610)

Beginning in the latter half of the 15th cent., a humanist faith in classical scholarship led to the search
for ancient texts that would increase current scientific knowledge. Among the works rediscovered were
Galen's physiological and anatomical studies and Ptolemy's Geography. Botany, zoology, magic,
alchemy, and astrology were developed during the Renaissance as a result of the study of ancient
texts. Scientific thinkers such as Leonardo da Vinci, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and
Johannes Kepler attempted to refine earlier thought on astronomy. Among Leonardo's discoveries
were the revelation that thrown or shot projectiles move in one curved trajectory rather than two;
metallurgical techniques that allowed him to make great sculptures; and anatomical observations that
increased the accuracy of his drawings.
In 1543 Copernicus wrote De revolutionibus, a work that placed the sun at the center of the universe
and the planets in semicorrect orbital order around it; his work was an attempt to revise the earlier
writings of Ptolemy. Galileo's most famous invention was an accurate telescope through which he
observed the heavens; he recorded his findings in Siderius nuncius [starry messenger] (1610).
Galileo's Dialogo...sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo [dialogue concerning the two chief world
systems] (1632), for which he was denounced by the current pope (because of Galileo's approval of
Copernicus), resulted in his living under house arrest for the rest of his life. Tycho Brahe gave an
accurate estimate of planetary positions and refuted the Aristotelian theory that placed the planets
within crystal spheres. Kepler was the first astronomer to suggest that planetary orbits were elliptical.

The Art of Calligraphy

It was inevitable that the upheval described above would also affect our subject matter. One of the
major benefits of this new milieu of learning and enquiry was the spreading of literacy, i.e. the ability of
not only to be able to read but also to write. Keeping diaries and notebooks became a widespread
practice, not only amongst artists and scientists but also amongst the wealthy upper classes and the
aristocracy, as did the sending back and forth of notes and letters. As a consequence the art of
calligraphy as well as of page layout and lettering aquired special importance. Calligraphy masters
travelled from mansions to palaces teaching the new educated elite these new fine crafts. However, it
is the scholarly notebooks and texts, often embelished with illustrations, that are the most noteworthy
of the genré.
Renaisance notebooks, late 15th to mid 16th centures. Top left is a letter of the famous Italian scholar
Pietro Bembo, after whom the
typeface "Bembo" was named by it's creator Francesco Griffi.

Leonardo da Vinci
Florentine painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and scholar, and one of the greatest minds of the
Renaissance; born at Vinci, near Florence, in 1452; died at Cloux, near Amboise, France, 2 May,
1519, natural son of Ser Piero, a notary, and a peasant woman. He was reared carefully by his father,
and was remarkably gifted and precocious. Few artists owed so little to circumstances and teachers.
He was quite self-made. His work was small in bulk, and what remains may be counted on fingers of
both hands. Few men had such varied talent and amassed such encyclopedic knowledge; his method
as an artist was original with him, science was the measure of beauty, he combined fact with poetry
and made use of both to carry on wide investigations in nature and to reproduce life according to the
very laws of life. There are three periods in Leonardo's biography: The Florentine period (1469-82);
the Milanese period (1483-99); the Nomadic period (1500-19).

Paintings of Leonardo da Vinci

Between 1490 and 1495 he developed his habit of recording his studies in meticulously illustrated
notebooks. His work covered four main themes: painting, architecture, the elements of mechanics, and
human anatomy. These studies and sketches were collected into various codices and manuscripts,
which are now hungrily collected by museums and individuals. It is these notebooks that are of
particular interest to us, not only due to the beautiful illustrations and technical drawings but also
through their extraordinary page layouts.
Notebook pages of Leonardo's concerning engineering projects.
Notebook pages of Leonardo's on anatomy.

Further reading and images

http://www.leonardo.net/
http://www.visi.com/~reuteler/leonardo.html
http://www.wga.hu/index1.html
http://www.mos.org/leonardo/bio.html

The Renaisance Book

The great intellectual movement of Renaissance Italy was humanism. The humanists believed that the
Greek and Latin classics contained both all the lessons one needed to lead a moral and effective life
and the best models for a powerful Latin style. They developed a new, rigorous kind of classical
scholarship, with which they corrected and tried to understand the works of the Greeks and Romans,
which seemed so vital to them. Both the republican elites of Florence and Venice and the ruling
families of Milan, Ferrara, and Urbino hired humanists to teach their children classical morality and to
write elegant, classical letters, histories, and propaganda.

Renaisance book bindings

The Renaisance illuminated books: Lighter, whiter and elegant.

In the course of the fifteenth century, the humanists also convinced most of the popes that the papacy
needed their skills. Sophisticated classical scholars were hired to write official correspondence and
propaganda; to create an image of the popes as powerful, enlightened, modern rulers of the Church;
and to apply their scholarly tools to the church's needs, including writing a more classical form of the
Mass.

Humanism, which began as a movement to revive ancient literature and education, soon turned to
other fields as well. Humanists tried to apply ancient lessons to areas as diverse as agriculture,
politics, social relations, architecture, music, and medicine. This new influx of knowledge necessitated
the production of secular books. In the Middle Ages, magnificent illumination was rarely used in the
decoration of secular texts. In the Renaissance, though sacred texts continued to receive the most
sumptuous decoration, secular texts began to rival them for elegance of script, illumination, and
binding.

Further reading and images

http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/vatican.exhibit/exhibit/Main_Hall.html

The Renaisance masters of type

New, humanist writings required creating a new type of fonts---more secular, more legible, and more
elegant. Additionally, the usage of paper had gradually replaced parchment and vellum and while rag
paper was still expensive it was still more cost efficient than parchment. Thus the need for the
condensed gothic typefaces was also becoming obsolete. Page designs were rapidly becoming
lighter, more and more white white space was making its apperance. Thus came the first "revival
wave," the first time when font artisans looked into the past in order to create better typefaces for the
present. The problem at that time was, however, that ancient Romans didn't have but uppercase,
capital letters. While adopting their designs for capitals, Renaissance typographers had to spend more
time working on lowercase lettershapes. As a basis, they took carolingian scripts that were common in
early Middle age (before the blackletter had become dominant style across the Western Europe), but
changed them significantly to match the Roman uppercase letters and to better adopt to Gutenberg's
printing technology (that had just appeared).

Aldus Manutius
(1450–1515) He was educated as a humanistic scholar and became tutor to several of the great ducal
families. One of them, the Pio family, provided him with money to establish a printery in Venice. Aldus
was at this time almost 45 years old. He devoted himself to publishing the Greek and Roman classics,
in editions noted for their scrupulous accuracy; a five-volume set of the works of Aristotle, completed in
1498, is the most famous of his editions. He was especially interested in producing books of small
format for scholars at low cost. To this end he designed and cut the first complete font of the Greek
alphabet, adding a series of ligatures or tied letters, similar to the conventional signs used by scribes,
which represented two to five letters in the width of one character. To save space in Latin texts he had
a type designed after the Italian cursive script; it is said to be the script of Petrarch. This was the first
italic type used in books (1501). Books produced by him are called Aldine and bear his mark, which
was a dolphin and an anchor. Aldus employed competent scholars as editors, compositors, and
proofreaders to insure accuracy in his books. Much of his type was designed by Francesco Griffi,
called Francesco da Bologna, who also designed the typeface "Bembo", after the Humanist scholar
Pietro Bembo. The Aldine Press was later managed by other members of his family, including a son,
Paulus Manutius (1512–74), and a grandson, Aldus Manutius (1547–97), who was best known for his
classical scholarship.

Binding and pages of "Aldine"s

Further reading and images

http://www.answers.com/topic/aldus-manutius

Claude Garamond
(1480–1561) was a Parisian publisher. He was one of the leading type designers of his time, and
several of the typefaces he designed are still in use, notably the font Garamond, named in his honor.
Garamond came to prominence in 1541, when three of his Greek typefaces were requested for a
royally ordered book series by Robert Estienne. Garamond based them on the handwritings of Angelo
Vergecio, the King's Librarian at Fontainebleau, and his ten-year-old pupil, Henri Estienne. According
to Arthur Tilley, the editions are "among the most finished specimens of typography that exist."
Garamond's Roman were created shortly thereafter, and his influence rapidly spread throughout and
beyond France during the 1540s.

Granjon, designed by Robert Granjon is the closest typeface to the original Garamond

There are several typefaces called Garamond. Some are based on the work of Claude Garamond.
The “original” Garamond belongs to the family of “Renaissance” or “old style” serif typefaces. The font
that most resembles the original Garamond is not named Garamond, but Granjon - designed by
Robert Granjon, to differentiate it from the many other kinds of Garamonds.
Geoffroy Tory,
one of the major printers in Paris during the first third of the sixteenth century, wrote and printed this
theoretical treatise on the design of Roman capital letters in 1529. He was rewarded by François I with
the title of Imprimeur du Roi in 1531.

Pages from Champs Fleury, 1529

Early type designers attempted to find special relationships between the proportions of the letters and
the shape and dimension of the human body. Thus, just like Dürer, whom he criticized severely, Tory
shows how to draw letters with geometrical aids, and how their proportions relate to the human body.
Although the book was not aimed at the printing trade, the work is mentioned by many subsequent
writers on lettering and printing and has had a great influence on typography.
The Baroque masters of type
From the Renaisance masters of type, who created/refined lowercase characters to setting up the
basic principles of page design we come to the Baroque masters who took the art of book design and
typography even further: Pages became even whiter, margins broader and type even more refined.
One of the most beautiful characteristics of Baroque page design are the ornate borders and
typographic flourishes.

In the arts, Baroque is both a period and the style that dominated it. The Baroque style used
exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and
grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, and music. The style started around 1600 in Rome, Italy and
spread to most of Europe. In music, the Baroque applies to the final period of dominance of imitative
counterpoint, where different voices and instruments echo each other but at different pitches,
sometimes inverting the echo, and even reversing thematic material.
Baroque flourishes

Yet another one are the printers marks:

A printer's mark

Philippe Grandjean
(1666-1714) was a French type engraver notable for his series of Roman and italic types known as
Romain du Roi (French: King's Roman). King Louis XIV, in 1692, directed that a typeface be
designed at any necessary expense for the exclusive use of the Royal printer. The design was carried
out by Grandjean together with a group of mathematicians, philosophers, and others.
Romain du Roi

William Caslon
(1692–1766) was an English gunsmith and designer of typographic fonts. In 1716 he started a
business in London as an engraver of gun locks and barrels, and as a bookbinder's tool cutter. Being
thus brought into contact with printers, he was induced to fit up a type foundry, largely through the
encouragement of William Bowyer. The distinction and legibility of his type secured him the patronage
of the leading printers of the day in England and on the continent.

His typefaces were influenced by Dutch types then common in England. His work influenced John
Baskerville and are thus the progenitors of Transitional types, which in turn led to Modern types.
Caslon typefaces were very popular and used for many important printed works, including the first
printed version of the Declaration of Independence. They fell out of favour in the century after his
death, but were revived in the 1840s, and Caslon-inspired typefaces are still widely used today.

John Baskerville
(1706 - 1775) was a printer in Birmingham, England, a member of the Royal Society of Arts, and an
associate of some of the members of the Lunar Society. He directed his punchcutter John Handy in
the design of many typefaces of broadly similar appearance. His businesses included japanning and
papier-mâché, but he is best remembered as a printer. He printed works for Cambridge University in
1758 and although an atheist, printed a splendid folio Bible in 1763. His fonts were greatly admired by
fellow member of the Royal Society of Arts, Benjamin Franklin, who took the designs back to the
newly-created United States, where they were adopted for most federal government publishing. His
work was criticized by jealous competitors and soon fell out of favor, but since the 1920s many new
fonts have been released by Linotype, Monotype, and other type foundries – revivals of his work and
mostly called 'Baskerville'.
Book pages designed by John Baskerville

It is thought that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who once lived in Birmingham, borrowed his name for one of
his Sherlock Holmes stories, The Hound of the Baskervilles - which, in turn, was borrowed by Umberto
Eco for the character William of Baskerville in his best-selling novel, The Name of the Rose.

Pierre Simon Fournier

(1712 - 1768) was a French mid-eighteenth century punch-cutter, typefounder and typographic
theoretician, master of the rococo form. Typefaces designed by Fournier include Fournier and
Narcissus.

He was known as Fournier le Jeune: his father Jean Claude was also in the type-setting industry. In
his early life, Fournier studied watercolour with J. B. G. Colson, and later wood engraving. In 1737,
Fournier published his first theoretical work, on the minimum spacing between letters, while still
retaining readability. The typefaces that Fournier and successors created had such extreme contrast
between thick and thin strokes, that there was a constant risk of the letters shattering.

Typographic manual by Fournier

When the Netherlands was superseeded by France, King Louis XIV commissioned new type for during
his reign, called Romain du roi. The King kept the font as a monopoly to himself, with penalties against
unauthorized reproduction. In the following century, Fournier's Modèles des Caractères (1742)
continued the romaine du roi style, but adapted it for his own new age. Upon publishing Modèles des
Caractères, filled with rococo and fleurons, Fournier's publication helped revive the 1500s concept of
type ornaments.

The masters of type of the Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment refers to either the eighteenth century in European philosophy, or the longer
period including the seventeenth century and the Age of Reason. It can more narrowly refer to the
historical intellectual movement The Enlightenment, which advocated Reason as a means to
establishing an authoritative system of aesthetics, ethics, and logic, which, they supposed, would allow
human beings to obtain objective truth about the universe. Emboldened by the revolution in physics
commenced by Newtonian kinematics, Enlightenment thinkers argued that the same kind of
systematic thinking could apply to all forms of human activity.

The intellectual leaders regarded themselves as a courageous elite who would purposely lead the
world into progress from a long period of doubtful tradition, irrationality, superstition, and tyranny,
which they imputed to the Dark Ages. The movement helped create the intellectual framework for the
American and French Revolutions, the Latin American independence movement, and the Polish
Constitution of May 3; and led to the rise of classical liberalism and capitalism. It is matched with the
high baroque and classical eras in music, and the neo-classical period in the arts; it receives
contemporary attention as being one of the central models for many movements in the modern period.

The 18th century brought about the ultiamte refinement in page design and typography, especially
embodied in Giambattista Bodoni's work. The beautiful font "Bodoni", named after him is one we use
with relish even today.

François-Ambroise Didot
(1730-1804) succeeded his father François, and was appointed printer to the clergy in 1788. All the
lovers of fine books highly appreciate the editions known as "D'Artois" (Recueil de romans français, 64
vols.) and "du Dauphin", a collection of French classics in 32 vols., edited by order of Louis XVI. He
also published a Bible. He invented a new printing-press, improved type-founding, and was the first to
print on vellum paper.
Book title page by Didot (left). Contemporary base upon Didot's type system

About 1780 he adapted the "point" system for sizing typefaces by width. This he established as 1/72nd
of a French inch (i.e., this was before the metric system), which was larger than any of the former
Imperial inch of the UK or that of the US, let alone the international inch of 25.4 mm. His unit of the
point was later named after him as the didot. It became the prevailing system of type measurement
throughout continental Europe, its former colonies, and Latin America. In 1973 it was metrically
standardized at 0.375 mm for the European Union. The English-speaking world, on the other hand,
established the unit called simply the "point," originally to the same proportion of the smaller inches of
the various countries.

Giambattista Bodoni
(1740-1813) was an Italian engraver, publisher, printer and typographer of high repute remembered
for designing a typeface which is now called Bodoni. Giambattista Bodoni achieved an unprecedented
level of technical refinement, allowing him to faithfully reproduce letterforms with very thin "hairlines",
standing in sharp contrast to the thicker lines constituting the main stems of the characters. His
printing reflected an aesthetic of plain, unadorned style, combined with purity of materials. This style
attracted many admirers and imitators, surpassing the popularity of French typographers such as
Philippe Grandjean and Pierre Simon Fournier. Bodoni was appointed printer to the court of Parma in
1768. Important folio editions by Bodoni are works by Horace (1791), Vergil (1793), and Homer
(1808). The Bodoni Museum, named for the artisan, was opened in Parma in 1963.
Book design by Giambattista Bodoni

Encyclopedias, maps and scientific Illustrations

Scientists illustrated their research and studies with images from early days onwards: Indeed even
some of the Egyptian frescoes seem to point at scientific depictions. There are, of course, many
herbariums and medicinal books in Medieval Europe that were illustrated with drawings; but it is with
the onset of the renaisance and especially the baroque and the age of the enlightenment, bringing
about the spirit of scientific accuracy and of research that scientific illustrations really came into their
own.

Andreas Vesalius
(1514 - 1564) was a Flemish anatomist and author of one of the most influential books on human
anatomy, De humani corporis fabrica (On the Workings of the Human Body). Vesalius is often referred
to as the founder of modern human anatomy. Vesalius' name is also referred to as Andreas Vesal or
Andreas van Wesel, depending on the source.

Anatomical drawings of Vesalius

Further reading and images

http://mcgovern.library.tmc.edu/data/www/html/collect/anatomy/Vesalius/VesaliusContents.htm

Sydney Parkinson
The voyage of HMS Endeavour (1768-1771), under the legendary Captain James Cook (1728 - 1779),
was the first devoted exclusively to scientific discovery. This link below will you to a site that presents
most of the botanical drawings and engravings prepared by artist Sydney Parkinson before his
untimely death at sea, and by other artists back in England working from Parkinson's initial sketches.

Born in Scotland, Parkinson came to London in 1766 and was soon after engaged by Banks to work at
the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where he worked for a year before before joining the Endeavour.
One of two on board artists, neither of whom survived the voyage, Parkinson died at sea shortly after
leaving Java.

Botanical drawings of Sydney Parkinson

Further reading and images

http://internt.nhm.ac.uk/jdsml/nature-online/endeavour-botanical/

Scientific illustrations of flora and fauna in the 17th and 18th Centuries
Johann Wilhelm Weinmann (1683-1741)
William Curtis (1746 - 1799)
Pierre Joseph Redouté (1759-l840)

The art of cartography

Martin Waldseemüller (1470 - 1522)
Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594) "The Mercator Atlas"
Abraham Ortelius(1527 - 1598) "Theatrum Orbis Terrarum"

Astronomy
Johann Bayer (1572 – 1625) "Uranometria"
Astronomical maps by Julius Schiller, 1627 (left) and Stanislaw Lubienicki, 1668 (right).

Further reading and images

http://www.lhl.lib.mo.us/events_exhib/exhibit/exhibits/stars/index.html

Encylopedias
Cyclopaedia, or, A Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (folio, 2 vols.) was an encyclopedia
published by Ephraim Chambers in London in 1728, and reprinted in numerous editions in the 18th
Century. The Cyclopaedia was one of the first general encyclopedias to be produced in English.

Tables from "Cyclopedia"

Encyclopédie, or "Encyclopedia, or a systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts" was an
early encyclopedia, published in France beginning in 1751, the final volumes being released in 1780.
The editor-in-chief Denis Diderot (1713 – 1784) was a French philosopher and writer, a prominent
figure in what became known as the Enlightenment.

Pages from "Encyclopédie"

Architectural and technical drawings

The famous work entitled "French Architecture" was written and illustrated by Jacques-François
Blondel between 1752-1756. The most significant churches, royal mansions, palaces, hotels,
residences and other buildings of Paris, as well as holiday homes and castles on the outskirts of Paris
and in other parts of France, built by the most celebrated architects". The full work contained 498
large-sized illustrations by celebrated architects showing panoramic views and detailed interior and
exterior decoration composition drawings of 18th century notable buildings churches, royal palaces,
monuments, parks, etc. A range of architectural styles can be viewed, and many of these buildings no
longer exist or been remodelled, such as the Palace of Tuileries which was destroyed by fire in 1871.
The initial four volume work was published by Charles-Antoine Jombert, one of the leading French
printer-publishers of the 18th century.

L'Architecture Francoise