The Origin and Development of Humanistic Script

185 Pages·1960·10.131 MB·English

by  Berthold Louis Ullman

B. L. ULLMAN
THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT
OF HUMANISTIC SCRIPT
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PREFACE
The lack of a detailed discussion of humanistic script has often been
deplored. Thus Paul Lehmann repeats E. Bernheim’s complaint that
this script has been treated in a stepmotherly fashion, that the question
of how, when, and where it arose has not been answered.1 Others have
pointed out the extreme importance of this neglected form of writing.
The style of writing which developed into the type fonts in use today
certainly is one of special importance and interest to us. A. Hessel2 3
contributed little to the story. Stanley Morison’s has been the leading
treatment in recent years2 though I must disagree with him in some
fundamental respects.
On a single page oj my book 4 I tried to answer Bernheim s three
questions. I developed the theme in an unpublished paper read at the
“Convegno Intemazionale di Studi sulk« Umanesimo»” at La Mendola
in August, 1956. Not even the present fuller treatment pretends to cover
the subject completely. The origin is presented in full detail but the
later developments are generally restricted: I have dealt only with Flo¬
rentine scribes who signed and dated their volumes and have left us
many examples of their work. There is still much to be done, such as
the investigation of the spread of the new Florentine script to other centers
and of the various local developments, the identification of unsigned
volumes, and the story of the later calligraphers.
Again, as in 1955, I wish to express my deep appreciation to don
Giuseppe De Luca, who by the publication of his magnificent series has
done so much for humanistic scholarship.
B. L.
Ullman
Chapel Hill, N. C., February 1958
1 Bayer. Akad. d. IViss., Phil.-hist. K 1918, Abh. 8.
2 “Die Entstehung der Renaissanceschriften,” Arch, fur Urkundenforschung,
XIII (1936), p. 1.
3 “Early Humanistic Script and the First Roman Type,” The Library, XXIV
(1943), p. 1.
4 Studies in the Italian Renaissance (Rome, 1955), p. 313.

Chapter I
BACKGROUND AND INSPIRATION —
COLUCCIO SALUTATI
The ancient Roman Empire had its various book hands — square
capitals, rustic capitals, uncials, half-uncials, as well as the cursive
scripts used for ordinary writing. These were used throughout its
domain. When the Empire broke up two opposing tendencies
became apparent in many aspects of life: not only did the several
parts of the former Empire develop many individual characteristics,
as might be expected, but they also continued some of their old
practices. So in writing: uncial and half-uncial remained in use,
but at the same time new book hands began to develop out of
cursive. Under half-uncial influence a simple script was developed
in France at the end of the eighth century just at the time when
Charlemagne was forming his empire, and it spread rapidly through¬
out the lands under the Emperor’s rule. This Carolingian script
reached its finest flower in the ninth century, then gradually
decayed. By the thirteenth century its transformation into Gothic
was complete. The characteristics of Gothic are lateral compres¬
sion, angularity, and what I have called fusion, the overlapping
of rounded letters, as in do.1 In a more cursive form it became
the bastarda. To these peculiarities of Gothic may be added the
great increase of abbreviations. How much the newly founded
universities of Europe, with their stationers and “pieces” (pecie) of
books which they rented out for copying, with their impoverished
students who needed inexpensive books rapidly produced, contrib¬
uted to these developments is a matter not yet investigated, so
far as I know.
1 This is not the same as the peculiarity of Bencventan script called union
by Lowe, for in Beneventan the letters do not overlap but are tangential (E. A.
Lowe, The Beneventan Script [Oxford, 1914], pp. 140, 149).
12
THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF HUMANISTIC SCRIPT
The development of Gothic indicated above apphes particularly
to France, Germany, and England. In Italy matters did not go
so far. While the Carolingian script was degenerating elsewhere,
in Italy it remained relatively pure and graceful. The large round
hand of twelfth-century Itahan manuscripts stands out among the
more crabbed scripts developing elsewhere.2 It is true that Gothic
script swept over Italy, but generally speaking it did not become
so extreme as across the Alps. Furthermore, there was a very
definite restraining force at an important and influential university
center. It was at the University of Bologna that the new interest
in Justinian brought about the production of numerous handsome
large codices of that author and then of other authors, in a script
appropriately called rotunda, Gothic though it was.3 A modifica¬
tion of this remained as the finest of the formal book hands of
northern Italy in the fourteenth century.4 Bologna’s university
also made no small contribution to incipient Italian humanism,
being attended by Petrarch, Coluccio Salutati, and other early
humanists. The humanists of the fourteenth century, men who
read more, perhaps, than their predecessors, preferred manuscripts
in large, clear writing, in littera antiqua, i.e., in the Carolingian
script of the ninth to twelfth centuries, particularly, perhaps, the
large twelfth-century Itahan script already mentioned. Petrarch,
Boccaccio, Salutati, and many others wrote in a legible Gothic
script, a less formal variety of the rotunda, not compressed or angu¬
lar but preserving the important Gothic element of fusion. I am
here referring to their book hands, not to their cursive notarial
scripts.5
It is important for the development of our theme to recall
here what Petrarch and Coluccio have to say about contemporary
handwriting. Petrarch writes to Boccaccio that a copy of his
(Petrarch s) epistles is being made, not in the spreading luxuriant
lettering, fashionable at a time when scribes are painters, that
pleases but tires the eyes, as if it were invented for anything else
2 See Fig. 1.
3 See Fig. 2.
4 See Fig. 3 for the work of a professional scribe employed by Coluccio
Salutati.
5 See Figs. 4-6 for the formal writing of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Coluccio
Salutati.
BACKGROUND AND INSPIRATION - COLUCCIO SALUTATI 13
than reading, but in a trim, clear hand, appealing to the eye.6 He
quotes Priscian’s etymology of litera “quasi legitcra,” i.e., legible.
He adds that orthography and grammar will not be neglected. The
former especially was in the scribe’s province, as we shall have
occasion to see. Elsewhere Petrarch well describes the minuteness,
compression, and excessive abbreviations in contemporary manu¬
scripts, which are hard on the eyes.7 The letters in abbreviations,
he says, seem to ride “piggyback”. There are other passages in
which Petrarch complains of the scarcity of satisfactory copyists.8
On the other hand, he praises a manuscript of Augustine given
him by Boccaccio: "Huic tali amicitie tue dono . . . et hbri decor
et vetustioris htere maiestas et ornnis sobrius accedit ornatus”
(Fatn. XVIII, 3, 9; 1355). This manuscript, still in existence (Paris,
B. N. lat. 1989), was, it is significant to note, written in the elev¬
enth century.
Petrarch was sixty-two when in 1366 he criticized current
handwriting as hard on the eyes. Coluccio was almost the same
age (sixty-one) when in 1392 he wished to obtain a Cicero “in
littera grossa” for his failing eyesight.9 In 1395 he asked his French
6 Epist. farn. XXIII, 19, 8 (1366): “Non vaga qnidem ac luxurianti litera
— qualis est vriptorum seu verius pictorum nostri temporis, longe oculos mul-
cens, prope autem afficiens ac fatigans, quasi ad aliud quam ad legendum sit
inventa, et non, ut grammaticorum princeps ait, litera “quasi legitera” dicta sit —
sed alia quadam castigata et clara seque ultro oculis ingerente, in qua nichil
orthographum, nichil oinnino grammatice artis omissum dicas.” Cf. Fatn. XIII,
4, 28 (1352): “Si oculos tuos artificiosis literarum tractibus assuetos scriptura in-
cultior [of Petrarch] offendit...”.
1 Sen. VI, 5, dealing with the completion of his De vita solitaria in 1366:
“Hoc... opus, breve licet, fidus tandem vix explicuit sacerdos quidam, litera non
tarn anxie exculta quam nostre atque omni etati, nisi fallor, idonea. Adole-
scentia enim cunctis suis in actibus improvida et insulsa miratrix inanium, con-
temptrix utilium, perexiguis atque compressis visumque frustrantibus literulis
gloriari solita est, acervans omnia et coartans atque hinc spatio, bine literarum
super literas velut equitantium aggestione confundens, que scriptor ipse brevi
post tempore rediens vix legat, emptor vero non tana librum quam libro ceci-
tatem emat.”
8 Cf. Sen. V, 1; X, 1.
9 Epist., ed. F. Novati, II (1893), p. 386. Boniface (born 680) was between
62 and 66 years old when he wrote that because of his fading eyesight he could
not clearly make out tiny, joined letters and asked that a manuscript to be copied
for him be written in “discretis et absolutis litteris’’ [Epist. 63). Were complaints
such as these responsible for the development of Carolingian script a generation
14 THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF HUMANISTIC SCRIPT
friend Jean de Montreuil for a copy of Abelard in “antiqua littera”,
as no other script was more pleasing to his eyes.10 The next year
he wrote the same Jean that he wanted copies of Augustine and
Quintilian in the best lettering, as like Italian script as possible.11
He seems to mean a script more like the plain Gothic he himself
used than the cramped French book hand, not to mention the
bastarda. About the same time he wrote concerning a copy of
Augustine that he had seen which was in rather large script and
which he would like to obtain because he was now an old man.12
He went on to say that he would like to turn his fading eyesight
away from the reading of his own copy, tiring because of the
small letters, to the more pleasant task of reading a copy in a larger
script.13 We do not know whether he received this manuscript;
if it exists, it has not been identified.14 But the manuscript which
Coluccio complained about is still available, and the writing is
truly tiny: the body of each letter is about one millimeter high.
In a writing space of 244 millimeters we find 59 litres, that is, each
line, including spacing, is only some four millimeters high.15
Why so much attention to the complaints of two aging men
of the fourteenth century? Because they explain what happened.
It may at first sight seem strange that it was the clear script of
fourteenth-century humanists like Petrarch and Coluccio rather
than the crabbed Gothic of France, Germany, and England that
was the first to be reformed. It is not always the institution or
later, just as the complaints of Petrarch and Coluccio, voiced when they were
about the same age as Boniface, led to the humanistic reform?
10 Epist. Ill (1896), p. 76. This must mean twelfth-century Carolingian
script, for Abelard died in 1142.
11 Epist. Ill, p. 147: “in optima httera et quanto magis fieri poterit italice
similis.”
12 Epist. Ill, p. 163: “qui fiber, cum scriptus sit httera satis grossa, me iam
senem illexit ut ilium habere desiderem.”
13 “Te deprecor et obtestor ut me voti mei compotem facias, ita quod
beneficio tuo possim a lectione hbri quern habeo parvitate litterarum michi
plurimum tediosa ad gratiorem legendi laborem, quod prestabunt ampliores lit-
tere, iam caligantes oculos applicare.”
14 I cannot accept Novati’s suggestion (III, p. 163, n. 1) that it is Fies. 12-13
of the Laurentian Library. There is no sign of ownership by Coluccio. The
marginal notes are not his.
15 Vat. Ottob. lat. 349. See Fig. 7.