Figure 1: Top, Newberry Library MS +92, the History of Spain by Roberto de Arevalo, written by hand in Italy, ca. 1470; bottom, a page from Jenson’s Eusebius of 1470.
s is true of almost every working person of the Renaissance, there are few verifiable facts about the life of Nicolas Jenson, and even fewer about the creation of his types. He described himself consistently as a Frenchman, so we can be sure he thought of himself as an outsider in Venice. It has often been written that early in life he was master of the royal mint at Tours and was commissioned by the king of France to go to Mainz and study the new art of printing which was invented there by Johannes Gutenberg around 1450. But there is no documentary evidence for this story; it is probably a legend.
We know that Jenson was born in Sommevoire in the Champagne region of France, perhaps in the 1430s. In 1480 he made out a detailed will describing his shop and workers, and died soon afterward. Before opening his own printing house in 1470, he may have collaborated with other printers in Italy as a punchcutter. It is clear from his will that he considered the types he engraved in metal to be his most important achievement.
The real history of Jenson is the history of the books he signed as printer, a story that begins in 1470 and lasts scarcely more than a decade. His famous Jenson Roman was the first type he made for his own print shop; we will examine its characteristics below. He recut and recast it in more compact form in subsequent years.
Beginning in 1474, Jenson cut five additional types, all black-letter. After 1475, Jenson used these black-letter types for almost all his new books. He used the compact version of his Roman only occasionally, chiefly for reprints of works by classical authors. A similar shift, from Roman to black-letter, characterized the careers of other early Venetian printers. The reasons for this change may be found in the markets for printed books and the patrons for them. Printing was introduced into Italy only in 1467. In the early 1470s there were still no markets ready to absorb the large numbers of books pouring from the new-fangled presses. In these earliest years of printing, the customers were more hypothetical than real!
Aristocrats and humanists who dominated the Italian literary scene commissioned the first Venetian books. They asked for and got types that imitated the “antique letter” favored by classicist readers, that is, Roman faces. After only a few years, however, printers discovered that a much larger market existed for books of law and theology, mathematics and medicine—the disciplines taught in the universities. Manuscript books in these fields had always been written with Gothic hands; teachers and students wanted their new, printed books to look the same. So Jenson and his contemporaries shifted their production to more profitable fields and changed their types to fit the demands of the market.
Jenson’s original Roman, was used intensively for only five or six years. It was designed for a particular kind of page, in the spacious, broad-margined books of classical literature invented by the humanists. This model is evident if we juxtapose two full-page layouts, one manuscript and one printed. Both pages are characterized by wide outer and bottom margins that create a spacious frame for a compact, evenly grey block of text set in long lines with fairly generous leading.
Figure 1: Top, Newberry Library MS +92, the History of Spain by Roberto de Arevalo, written by hand in Italy, ca. 1470; bottom, a page from Jenson’s Eusebius of 1470.
In the manuscript book, the flow of the pen strokes, constantly remeasured by the eye of the scribe, and the slight irregularities of the individual handwritten letters enliven the rather cool formality of the page. The printed page is even cooler overall because of the mechanical regularity of the type, but the text block takes on liveliness and sparkle from the fluid lines of the strokes within the letters, from the eccentric forms of some letters, and from the extremely wide capitals. We should look at each of these characteristics in turn.
Figure 2: Several lines of Jenson’s Roman type, as used in his 1470 edition of Eusebius.
Jenson’s elegant drawing of the letterforms is one of the aspects of the type most admired by modern critics and most imitated by all of the revivalists. Jenson gave gentle curves to almost all of the “straight,” vertical lines (most evident in N, l, and d). He placed uneven weight on opposing serifs so as to throw each character gently out of balance. And he constantly violated the visual baseline in drawing the bows of such letters as c, e, d, o, and b.
Some of the forms can only be called bizarre, but even here we can observe that each of the oddities tends to give the overall line (and on some level, probably unconscious, also the page) additional sparkle and life. The i-dot is displaced far to the right, pulling the reader’s eye along with it in the direction of reading. Several of the superscript abbreviation marks required by Renaissance Latin are also displaced to the right in this same way. The letters that are very rare in Latin, moreover, are drawn with a certain exoticism: y has an exaggeratedly rigid tail, and the lowercase z is extravagantly large.
Figure 3: Line of all-caps from Jenson’s 1471 Caesar. Very few lines were set all caps in the 1470 books of Jenson, but later he commonly uses caps for chapter heads and colophons. Here we see a relatively long line that allows us to view the shapes and fit of the Jenson’s capital alphabet.
These capitals are more typical of Renaissance forms than modern ones. Jenson was creating this type while humanist scholars and archaeologists were making the first careful drawings of Roman inscriptions on stone. The scholars imitated in manuscript capitals what they saw on the marble remnants of the ancient world: extremely broad, highly formal capital letters. Jenson did the same. The capitals seem almost to have their own frames of space, different from those used for the lower case. Notice how broad the N and H are, and how the upright strokes often depart from the true vertical. The asymmetry of serifs we observed in the lower case is even more pronounced here.
Jenson did not kern (adjust letter fit by filing away the edges of the metal on which the letters are formed) either his upper or lower case letters. In the case of the capitals this practice emphasizes the way in which each letter seems to inhabit its own distinct space, and it also exaggerates our own (modern) sense that the capitals and lower case letters do not fit very well. In fact the overall tone of the page and the movement of the eye are not much affected by what seems a flaw to us; on the contrary, the liveliness of the page which we also admire is in part due to these apparent flaws.
Copyright ©1997 Paul Baker and Paul Gehl
2nd revision September 21, 1996
1st revision August 20, 1996