English to Italian Art/Literary Art, Arts & Crafts, Painting CALLIGRAFIA

It is thirteen years, following the sack of Rome, before we see another
book from a Roman writing master. By then the city was rebuilt, and
its population stood a little higher than it had before its ordeal. But the
more restrained atmosphere of the 1530s and 40s affected the penmanship
of Giovambattista Palatino. His portrait stares at us from the
opening page of his Libro Nuovo d’Impare a Scrivere Tutte Sorte Lettere
(A new book for learning to write all sorts of letters) of 1540. He sports
a full beard, similar to that grown by Clement VII in mourning for the
sack of the city. The author’s praises are sung in a dedicatory sonnet.
Palatino’s cancellaresca has grown tall and thin; the OBLONG around which
it is formed is now twice as high as the letter is wide and the letters
appear compressed and pointed. Stanley Morison has described it as
a ‘crystallised and petrified’ version of the free script of Arrighi and
Tagliente, a reaction ‘against too much licence in troubled times’.91 He
quotes James Wardrop writing of this more rigid framework: ‘It was the
old black letter formulae over again.