Hi ! Here is my attempt to give an Italic to my jensonian Uccello.
As I don't like very much Arrighi cursive letters (Cancellaresca) which were used as a companion to Centaur (the original Arrighi's work is even more agressive than Frederic Warde design), I took my inspiration in a rare calligraphic typeface found in
a book of Carolus Clusius and printed by Christophe Plantin. However I think the two pages with this Italic are printed from engraving and not from movable letters.
There is no kerning at the moment. Some groups like "r-f-o" need work again.
Thanks in advance for any comment.
Comments
As has been mentioned, perhaps a little wider, and maybe make the entry strokes at the x-height match those at the ascender height, to move away from the “pot hook” style which relates more, as you infer, to an engraved style.
You are always welcome to drop by at an EcTd session, of course.
Frank
Frank just sent me a mail, asking to share some information about Granjon and the museum. For your information, I was in the ExpertClass last year, having also worked on Granjon's Ascendonica Romaine and Cursive/Droite. You probably saw my two panels at the expo at the Cathedral.
As Frank said, the stempels of Granjon's Ascendonica Cursive are in the museum, you can only access them on Monday. But the matrices are available. If you want to use my photographs, just send me a mail/message, I will upload my photos somewhere. But next to it, I recommend you to see the actual material in the reading room of the museum. It's a special experience. The Plantin Institute just got a new USB-Mircoscope, if you want to take photos on your own. If you need help ordering the matrices/stempels at the museum, I can also help you with that
This is a really pretty italic, on its own terms, though I find the very wide caps—the few that are shown—to be a little jarring, especially with this narrow spacing. Can you show us the rest?
Italic caps are a late development, long after Jenson, and even Granjon and Garamond saw their italics often used with roman caps, as was the early custom. This creates a paradox: Jenson’s caps are very wide and never became a model for the subsequent generations of typefounders or even for near-contemporaries, such as Griffo. Frank Blokland has written very persuasively about why this was the case in an article I commissioned from him for the book The Eternal Letter: Two Thousand Years of the Classical Roman Capital (MIT Press, 2015, ed. Paul Shaw).
I agree with others in saying that the French italic is a poor match to the Venetian roman. Ivan, you are not the first to try such a marriage. In the early 1980s, pre-PostScript, Ronald Arnholm designed a type called Legacy for ITC. The roman is a very successful take on Jenson (one of the best still), but the italic doesn’t work. Legacy lacks oldstyle figures and a full range of ligatures, so it’s seldom seen, even though it is available and sold on all the major sites.
Perhaps there’s no such thing as an italic that is truly compatible with Jenson’s roman, but that doesn’t mean you should stop trying! We’ll know a "right" one when we see it . . .
After all, the cancelleresca is the model broad-nib calligraphic italic style to this day, contemporary with Jenson, and became the ur-italic font style, just as “Jenson” is the ur-roman.