Any Such Thing As Humanist Bookhand Majascules/capital Letters?

[gshillitani]

I have duly searched the forums and the internet in general, looked in a few books, and I cannot figure out if there is an established Humanist set of capital letters. A lot of the photos on the posts I got as a result of my search are no longer available, so that hindered my search a bit.

 

I'm sure this is a ridiculously stupid question... but please let me know if such a thing exists?

 

Gina

[inkstainedruth]

This is typography, rather than calligraphy, but it might give you a place to start:

https://ilovetypography.com/2016/04/18/the-first-roman-fonts/

Scrolling down the page I found a complete alphabet, for both upper and lower case letters.

And this site: https://sexycodicology.net/blog/codicology/medieval-scripts/humanistic-script/ shows some manuscripts which are clearly calligraphed, not typeset, and part of the text is clearly upper case in some of the images.

For how to actually write the capitals, track down David Harris' The Art of Calligraphy (I downloaded it from someplace as a .pdf). There's a chapter on "Italian and Humanist Scripts" and it has instructions for Rotunda, Rotunda capitals, Humanist minuscule, Italic, Humanist and Italic capitals, and Italic Swash Capitals.

Hope this helps.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[dms525]

I think Roman majuscules work best with Humanist Bookhand.

 

David

[gshillitani]

Thank you both! I was able to find that PDF, Ruth, so I'll be studying it I'm working on improving my everyday writing hand and experimenting with different styles (and making sort of style combination letters along the way). My handwriting is legible but it's a mishmash of upper- and lower-case letters in cursive and print in the same words and sentences There's definitely room for improvement!

 

Gina

[Runnin_Ute]

That sounds familiar,Gina. I know I do it some too. Not as much as I used to of course, but still do.

[mliptrot]

Hi,

 

In a calligraphy course I took part in last Summer, we based our humanist writing (majuscules and minuscules) on the work of Bartolomeo Sanvito. There are images of his work available online. There are similarities with Roman caps but they are different enough. Sanvito has particularly sloping As and Vs that set his work apart.

 

We looked specifically at his manuscript of Homer's Iliad (this was part of Homer week) as it has both coloured titles and humanist text.

 

Hope this helps,

 

Mark

[inkstainedruth]

Hi,

 

In a calligraphy course I took part in last Summer, we based our humanist writing (majuscules and minuscules) on the work of Bartolomeo Sanvito. There are images of his work available online. There are similarities with Roman caps but they are different enough. Sanvito has particularly sloping As and Vs that set his work apart.

 

We looked specifically at his manuscript of Homer's Iliad (this was part of Homer week) as it has both coloured titles and humanist text.

 

Hope this helps,

 

Mark

 

Cool. Any links available? Or do I just have to Google Sanvito to find the info?

Oh, great -- just what I need. Something ELSE to be a research distraction from what I'm *supposed to be doing (Two days ago it was the Coronation Roll of Edward IV. Don't ask.)

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[mliptrot]

Sorry for the slow reply - here's a link

 

https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/record.asp?MSID=8276&CollID=16&NStart=140303

 

Hope that works.

 

Mark

[inkstainedruth]

Thanks for the link.

Now that my project is over and done with I have time to look at tangent stuff. Like that, and what to do with all the bamboo that has escaped from my neighbor's yard, and of course that Coronation Roll of Edward's....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[dms525]

Thanks for the link.

Now that my project is over and done with I have time to look at tangent stuff. Like that, and what to do with all the bamboo that has escaped from my neighbor's yard, and of course that Coronation Roll of Edward's....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

Oooo ... Bamboo! Last weekend, I had a two day-long lesson in making pens from bamboo by Sumner Stone (head of Typography at Adobe Systems, when selling fonts was a big part of their business). How big around is the bamboo you want to get rid of?

 

David

[dms525]

Hi,

 

In a calligraphy course I took part in last Summer, we based our humanist writing (majuscules and minuscules) on the work of Bartolomeo Sanvito. There are images of his work available online. There are similarities with Roman caps but they are different enough. Sanvito has particularly sloping As and Vs that set his work apart.

 

We looked specifically at his manuscript of Homer's Iliad (this was part of Homer week) as it has both coloured titles and humanist text.

 

Hope this helps,

 

Mark

 

Thanks for the link, Mark. I've looked at the lovely manuscript. The majuscules are definitely Roman, although not of outstanding quality. This document is hand written, of course, probably with a quill. The most familiar examples of Roman capitals are on monuments. According to Fr. Edward Catich, they were painted with a broad brush and then cut with chisel and mallet.

 

Sanvito's "humanist cursive" is very nice. I think we would call it "formal italic" today. The letter forms are really italic - basically oblong or oval rather than round - and are not cursive, in that there are no joins. If you want to see a "real" Humanist script, look for documents written by Poggio Bracciolini.

 

David

[mliptrot]

Hope this works:

 

 

This is my verse (we did 8 lines each and displayed them at the end of the course for the other students to see). Between us we did most of the first part of Homer's Iliad!

 

On A4 sized vellum (calfskin) written with Mitchell nibs, sumi ink and red gouache.

[dms525]

Hope this works:

 

 

This is my verse (we did 8 lines each and displayed them at the end of the course for the other students to see). Between us we did most of the first part of Homer's Iliad!

 

On A4 sized vellum (calfskin) written with Mitchell nibs, sumi ink and red gouache.

 

Very nice!

 

David

[inkstainedruth]

 

Oooo ... Bamboo! Last weekend, I had a two day-long lesson in making pens from bamboo by Sumner Stone (head of Typography at Adobe Systems, when selling fonts was a big part of their business). How big around is the bamboo you want to get rid of?

 

David

 

Unfortunately, I think it's sufficiently big in diameter that it would be way too big for a pen (even if you were making a pen for Andre the Giant...). I haven't gone out back and checked (my allergies have mostly kept me out of the yard, but I suspect a lot of it is more than an inch across the stem. It's certainly big enough around that last summer my husband couldn't whack it back with the regular hedge trimmer (the electric one) and was considering getting out the chainsaw (which he doesn't like using unless someone is out there with him in case of emergencies...).

I just checked with him and he said some of it is 2-2/12" in diameter (and as high as 15 FEET). I'm actually thinking about reading up on learning to make paper with it. Papermaking is something I've always wanted to try (and not the "papermaking" as art class I took in college, where we were basically recycling old paper and mixing up the torn paper and water slurry in a household blender....

The people who planted it (and who have since moved away) apparently didn't plant it correctly. To plant running bamboo so that it DOESN'T grow beyond where you want it? It involves a 2' or 3' deep trench around the bed, and heavy grade plastic panel sheeting held in place with rebar... (or at least that's what they did on an old episode of Gardening by the Yard). The rebar holds the panels in place, and the plastic keeps the bamboo where you want it (and you have to have the trench deep enough, and the plastic fairly far down, to keep the roots from going down and then over to where you DON'T want the bamboo).

Bamboo is a grass. It behaves like grass -- it's just that it's such a LARGE variety of grass that the roots will go fairly far down to find a place to spread to....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[cellmatrix]

Sorry to arrive late to this thread, but here is what I think is the best practical resource for those wanting to learn humanist/bookhand.....

 

http://jp29.org/itdr.htm

 

and concerning the OP's question, here is an article from the above resource on humanist majuscules....

 

http://jp29.org/capitals.htm

[andreasn]

I'm coming in very late here, but as has been said Roman capitals is the way to go. The humanist script is really a modernized form of Carolingian minuscule, a firmly medieval script but assumed by the humanists to be a classical roman development, probably not helped by the fact that the Carolingians fancied themselves as a revived Roman empire. Carolingian minuscule often used large Uncial letters at the start of paragraphs and other points of emphasis, and I think some humanist calligraphers might have continued that convention, in fact you still occationally see it done in printed books today. When doing anything humanist, remember just remember that they were obsessed with everything roman, so that's going to be you're starting point in all things humanist.