Garamont, Granjon, and the redesign of italics

James Puckett

Was there more to Garamont and Granjon’s redesign of italic type than making them harmonize with their roman types? I’m trying to understand if their shift away from the more calligraphic types of Griffo, Arrighi, and Colines was related to some changes in French hands or if they were just being practical.

Scott-Martin Kosofsky

A very good question, James. I can't claim to have any particular expertise in this, but I think it's quite clear that, while early Italian italics were imitative of contemporary writing masters, the French type cutters of the later 16th century were creating something intrinsically typographic, no longer based on handwriting, though very likely based on the high style of contemporary cartographers of the Low Countries, notably Jacob van Deventer and Gerard Mercator.

Hendrik Vervliet's "Palaeotypography of the French Renaissance" covers this ground admirably.