Francesco Griffo
Francesco Griffo (* 1450 in Bologna ; † 1518 there ; also Francesco da Bologna ) was an Italian type founder, die cutter, type designer and printer . With his first Antiqua, he founded a new typeface class, which is now called French Renaissance Antiqua (English: Garalde ), and cut the first italic fonts for use in letterpress printing.
Life
From 1495 onwards, Francesco Griffo worked for Aldus Manutius , for whom he initially produced Greek letters that, with their intertwined lines, imitated the handwriting of Greek scholars. These fonts - although very popular with the learned public - were not very reader-friendly and made work difficult for the typesetters. In 1495 a five-volume Aristotle edition was published by Aldus Manutius in a Greek italic cut by Griffo. In February 1496 Griffo first developed an Antiqua typeface for the essay De Aetna by the Italian scholar Pietro Bembo , which soon became very popular: the De Aetna type . In 1930 it was republished by Monotype under the name Bembo . Griffo also created an Antiqua for the novel Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (published 1499), which was reprinted as Poliphilus in 1923 as a copy by Monotype .
1501 developed Griffo after the pattern of a pontifical clerical script ( humanist italics ) an italic style, the appearance of a cursive imitated, but did not have the disadvantage of poor readability and difficult feasibility in the sentence. This first italic type in Latin letters was used for a Virgil edition published by Manutius. Presumably, commercial goals also played a role in the success of the italics, because this narrower typeface made better use of the paper format possible.
In 1502 Griffo and Manutius parted in a dispute. A year later he cut his second Italics for Petrarch edition of the printer Gershom (Girolamo) Soncino , the 1503 appeared in Fano in competition with the epochal issue of Manutius (1501), and in the dedication of the printer Cesare Borgia with The invention of italics for Francesco Griffo, linked to the name of Manutius, claimed. In 1516 Griffo opened his own printing house in Bologna. He set his first print in another cursive font that he had cut himself.
In Robin Sloan's novel The Odd Bookstore of Mr. Penumbra appears the Griffo-like figure of Griffo Gerritszoon, whose font Gerritszoon is preinstalled on every Apple Mac , which refers to the font Iowan Old Style , derived from Bembo by John Downer , which refers to Apple's iBooks is used and is a system font in iOS and OS X.
Web links
- Original print by De Aetna
- Francesco Griffo da Bologna: fragments & glimpses: a compendium of information & opinions about his life and work
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Griffo, Francesco |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Francesco de Bologna |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Italian typographer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1450 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Bologna |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1518 |
| Place of death | Bologna |