“The First Roman Fonts”, 2016-04-18 (; backlinks; similar):
[Where did our fonts come from? Your standard Latin alphabet can be written in many styles, so where did the regular upright sort of font (which you are reading right now) come from? Boardley traces the evolution of the Roman font from its origins in Imperial Roman styles through to the Renaissance, where it was perfectly placed for the print revolution and canonization as the Western font. Early printers, working in a difficult business, would invent the new typefaces they needed, modeled on humanist scribes’ Roman script, refining the letters into what we know today, including such variants as the lowercase ‘g’ (which looks so different from the handwritten letter).]
The Renaissance affected change in every sphere of life, but perhaps one of its most enduring legacies are the letterforms it bequeathed to us. But their heritage reaches far beyond the Italian Renaissance to antiquity. In ancient Rome, the Republican and Imperial capitals were joined by rustic capitals, square capitals (Imperial Roman capitals written with a brush), uncials, and half-uncials, in addition to a more rapidly penned cursive for everyday use. From those uncial and half-uncial forms evolved a new formal book-hand practiced in France, that spread rapidly throughout medieval Europe.
…From the second quarter of the 16th century, roman types, hitherto reserved almost exclusively for classical and humanist literature, began to make inroads into those genres that had traditionally been printed in gothic types. Especially from the 1520s in Paris, we witness books of hours and even Psalters set in roman types.
Two Latin alphabets inspired by both antique and medieval antecedents. Majuscules first incised in stone more than two millennia ago, married to minuscule letterforms that evolved from manuscript hands of the eighth and ninth centuries. The Carolingian or Caroline minuscule joined forces with antique Roman square capitals at the very beginning of the 15th century—a conjunction willed by the great Florentine humanists; their forms first wrought in metal by two German immigrants at Subiaco and Rome, honed by a Frenchman, and consummated at the hands of Griffo of Bologna and Aldus the Venetian. A thousand years after the fall of the Roman Empire, the romans returned and re-conquered—yet another thing the Romans have done for us.
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