Francesco Petrarca Between the Gotica and Littera Antiqua: the Graphic Reform of Script and the Humanist Aesthetic.

Abstract

The present article discusses the fundamental role of Petrarch’s script evolution in the graphic reform carried out by Italian Humanists of the 15th century from the gothic script to humanist miniscule. His exposure to the various scripts in use – from the Tuscan chancery style to the gotica libraria style of universities and monasteries – afforded Petrarch the perspective to develop his own model of writing, one which more capably responded to his philological and practical conception of writing. The contemporary gloss script known as the scriptura notularis, whose essential elements were based on the Carolingian model, provided the foundation for a style which Petrarch developed, through imitatio, into a more elegantly refined form in an attempt at greater clarity and spaciousness. Inevitably, this gloss script reform moves toward a textual script reform, whose motivation lies in Petrarch’s intimate knowledge of scribal practices along with the importance he places on philological concerns for which most scribes of his day had little regard. It is also founded in the elementary need for a more clear and legible text than provided by the cramped, gothic script. Petrarch discerned a possible solution to the deficiencies of contemporary book scripts in the Carolingian model: the Caroline miniscule satisfied the poet’s criteria for an ideal script, and thus he modified the form to fit his goals of clarity, equilibrium, and simplicity. It is Petrarch’s intermediary, semi-gothic script that was used as the foundation of the Italian Humanist script reform.