A Fragmentary Treatise on Epigraphic Alphabets by Fra Giocondo da Verona

Abstract

T HE renewed enthusiastic interest in the classical world in the quattrocento brought about a shift of taste which affected all cultural activity, including writing both in its calligraphic and epigraphic styles. Poggio Bracciolini is now generally recognized as the innovator in this area; inspired by the manuscripts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, he initiated the elegant, clear and pleasant-toread humanistic script. 1 At the same time a change took place in the inscriptions that painters, sculptors, and architects inserted in their works. Because of increasing attention paid to Roman monuments and inscriptions, Gothic letters, often casually chosen and squeezed one against another in an inappropriate and insufficient space, gradually disappear from paintings, sculptures, and monuments of the quattrocento. In their place we find, especially in secular works, beautiful Roman capitals, well proportioned and carefully arranged in adequate and prominent spaces.2 Magnificent examples of this new style are the inscriptions of Mantegna (especially in the frescoes of St. James, now lost but formerly in the Eremitani Church in Padua, ca. 1454-1455) and of Alberti (particularly the one along the frieze of the Holy Sepulchre in the Rucellai chapel in Florence, I467).3 Neither Alberti nor Mantegna left any written testimony about the method by which their alphabets were formed. We have, however, a small manuscript which contains an alphabet, Codex