 So we're starting with this beautiful graffiti that was on the wall Just one bridge up from the Vatican the wall on the Tiber River, and I would see this On my evening walks, and I got pictures of it during the day But I had to go back and get it at night under the street lights And I thought I'd start tonight with the oldest Lettering I'm going to show you tonight, and this is on Ponte Fabricio to the Isola Tiberina and the bridge was built in 62 BC, and there's no indication that the lettering was not done at the time And it was built of tuft and pepperino Whatever that is and faced with travertine marble. So the the inscription is on both sides of the bridge And really lovely. I saw this on my first trip to Rome It's on five itineraries. Do you know the book five itineraries of inscriptions? Essential to go to Rome with that. There's walking tours five different walking tours That will take you by inscriptions that are all listed in their historical stuff and on the island then the night that we went on this last trip to the island It's now the home of a film festival. So this is This sculpture of lettering. Can anybody read this? life is a movie is all it says and It's not the greatest lettering in the world, but it's a nice try, right? I Also had the best cheeseburger. I've had in all of Europe on this island that night I mean I'm really seriously I want to go back for more pictures, but I'm gonna get one of those burgers, too So this is kind of the mascot of the of the issue the last issue and of the show tonight This letter was Well, I'll show you the whole inscription here the this is the dedication to the temple of the genius of Augusta and it was done 7 to 2 BC Did I tell you the bridge was 62 BC that that makes that the oldest okay? So sometimes when they give that big of a range I'm not sure if it means that they're just guessing that it was during that time or that it took five years for the thing to happen but What this says is Mamiya daughter of Publius She was a public priestess to the genius No, I'm sorry She's a public priestess to the genius of Augusta on her own land at her own and at her own expense So this is in the archaeological museum in Naples, which is so rich You want to hear a sad story? Dean Rubino and David Brooks went to Italy to see everything and they went to this museum that day and the epigraphic section was closed I Mean tonight when I came downstairs, there was a red rope across keeping me from using the bathroom on this floor so I had to go up to the zoo, you know and I Wanted to jump over that thing and and so David said he almost had to restrain Dean from Going over the rope and seeing those things, but I send her all the pictures Anyway, everything that's not everything, but most of the stuff that is in the Naples Museum is from Pompeii So all the stuff we're looking at here is from Pompeii and this was You know a temple in Pompeii so you can see here that the The letters themselves when you when you stand back from even that beautiful s which is on the second row Has a flatness to it and you know what it reminds me of is the s in centaur never noticed the e in centaur Perfection, but the s has that flat spot at the bottom in the the flat spot here This reminds me of that, but then when you get up close to it Just unbelievable and the seraphs are so expressive so this is two BC at its latest and These seraphs are just amazing in all of these letters So this is you know more than a hundred years before the Trajan column and also on that same wall This is the eulogy of Romulus and the eulogy of Aeneas And they say this one seven BC to two AD the estimate of time I guess marble also from the from Pompeii the forum in Pompeii and I just love the I love that those caps that straddle Rustic and a condensed Roman and these are beautiful that way Also in the museum in Naples This is a fragment of painted plaster from the Flavian age Flavian age 69 to 96 AD but You know, this is a painted wall in Pompeii, so I'm guessing that it's pretty close to 79 AD And you know the inscriptions and lettering public lettering that you would see Has abbreviations galore so that top line Actually says vote for Trebius an honest man for a delay. So here's the guy's name here's the The post he's running for and he's three letters say he's an honest man apparently and The one on the bottom also a campaign sign Says vote for Marcus Serenius Vatia for a delay Who is worthy of public office and then? ironess ironness Is the last thing we're seeing the guy's name and that means that he recommends him so both of these Beautifully painted on the wall so quick But in that in a nice rustic So we're gonna jump from there to Leon which was in Roman times called Look Dunham and this is the Claudian table, which is the the main The main attraction in the Roman Gallo Museum in Leon and I don't want to sound like a Travel agent, but Leon is a fantastic place for all kinds of stuff and and Inscriptions and lettering is not the least of it Besides the food and fantastic location. There's a brand new museum at the Confluence of the rivers right at the point of the bottom of Leon There's this beautiful new museum that is indescribable really plus the Roman Gallo Museum. So the Claudian table is a speech That Claudius, let's see Claudius was born in Leon in 10 BC one of two emperors that that came from Leon and this speech that he gave was It Just in the Senate in the support of Gallic leaders who were asking for the same rights as Roman citizens And it's presumed that it was successful because the speech has been enshrined this way so this was carved in wax and cast in bronze and Then touched up with a chisel So the fantastic thing about it is that the letters feel kind of silver But it's really just the way it's catching the light that it's mostly cast But if they wanted to they would go back in and touch these things up With the a chisel afterwards Isn't it cool and it's big, you know the fact half of it's missing. Let's go back to the I don't know if this is half of it, but the top part is missing So this is about six feet tall. I'd say something like that. Yeah Well, they were you know, the letters were so small that I I didn't you know I read about that after I'd taken a picture of the You know the the thing on the wall it tells you what's going on So I couldn't see here's here's a close-up and I'm sorry this picture is out of focus, but I do love the the Dancing of that are and the tall I Plus those serifs remember those serifs because we're gonna see them again in a significant spot so Leone the Roman Gallo Museum is at the top of the hill where there's the ruins of the Roman Roman life from that time from 2,000 years ago. There was a forum up at the top of the Hill in fact Wikipedia says there was a Trajan forum But I think that's a mistake but there was a Roman forum at the top of the hill and they've since built a cathedral there and Right down the hill from that is the the Roman Gallo Museum And they have two Roman theaters left and ruins of an amphitheater and they still use the theaters for productions now plays and movies one of them is called Odeon Odeon in Leone and So you take a funicular to get up to the top of that and I got this fantastic picture we got on the funicular first and we were sitting down and then this little family moved in and we're ready for their unwitting portrait, but look at the look at the mouth and the noses of all these three kids and They must have their father's face because that's their mother and this is the little brother And they didn't even know it. I just did this, you know from my from my lap and caught this magic picture It's really so you get up to the top of the hill and here is this cathedral. It's the Notre Dame de Fourvierre Which means let me see I've got that written down here's place It's an inversion of Voo forum or forum Vitas, which is old forum or market So they've named the church on the fact that it was in the location of the forum And it's this magnificent place full of these murals that are all mosaic with gold tiles and there They go on forever the the This mosaic here on the right is the says in the Roman numerals 19 I'm sorry 1852 but all the dates that I found when I researched this say it's 1872 So I think they left out a couple of X's But that one was when it was conceived and built between 1872 and 1885 1884 and these Mosaic murals were done right at the turn of the century. So This I got a little bit of Translation help from Dean Rubino for this. Thank you very much Dean It says at the end of this mortals life work the distinguished painter finds purpose in himself And I think these letter forms are a function of the You know the mosaic process that there there isn't much at all thick and thin so it's Really nearly a monoline Roman And you'll see that throughout the lettering that I'm going to show you from this mural These are signatures so one section of the murals were finished in I Wait 1890 So what that says it has four C's instead of so it started then and this was designed by Charles Lumiere and the mosaic artist was Gilbert and Martin and then later there's one here that says it was finished in 1915 so 1900 okay There's a five. There's a V on the end of this. I don't know if you can see it, but this is the same Inscription or the same mosaic taken from different angles. So you can see how luminous these tiles are so it's on the side here That is the same one and at this point René Martin was doing the mosaic by himself and Lumiere had gotten himself a partner This is George a decoct or however you say it and I should have apologized in advance for all the mispronunciations I'm going to do tonight This is a ceiling all this is mosaic. It's incredible. I took these pictures and didn't Notice whether or not this was cast in metal or carved out of wood But there were two of these over the exits there was one to st. Lucas and one to st. Mark so the inset here is mark From the the same kind of thing down the way and you can still see mosaics like crazy behind it and the lettering Runs across the bottom of all of this so again you see this Nearly monoline Roman they did get the seraphs in though done in mosaic really gorgeous And this is right up the hill I'm right right up the hill from the Roman Gallo Museum which is full of Classic inscriptions as well as lots and lots of What Dean calls every day not so polished writing and carving which is what captivates. So this is a Small Dedication to the three mother goddesses from 201 ad It's formally embedded in the Leon's a nae church and it's dedicated to the matres Auguste by Felgo and Really interesting character here is this pH ligature and But the really the beautiful letters this are that reminds me of woody what woodpecker for some reason Beautiful dancing letter and still has the the the red paint in it Or it was repainted, you know who knows So I feel felt like I had to throw in a couple of a pretty straightforward Romans for you in And the museum is full of that look how the wide stance on this end That's the sort of standout letter and I noticed that lots and lots of the inscriptions in the Museum had S's that leaned forward a little bit and Plus there's a wide kick on the R. We'll see that a lot so that was No, that was one piece and then this one is a four-piece inscription and here's a detail of that and The lettering I love the lettering of course, but seeing the ravages of time on things is another big part of this for me So I love the the rivers of Cracks that are going through this one So this is one of the one of the theaters that you can see from a window This picture was taken from a window in the museum The museum is built into the hillside as it starts to run down towards this and the first time I went This is my third trip to Leon The first time I went they wouldn't let me take pictures in the museum But they have this big quarry of inscriptions out here And you can jump from stone to stone and take pictures You know like this and a really a lot of fun these trailers weren't here the first time and seemed like there were more of these inscriptions But luckily they've relaxed the photography Restriction and it's boy. It's still really worth going the first time I went I wasn't even planning on going to Leon I stopped in Belgium and Christopher Bodin's I'd gone to see Jean-Claude Lamberot exhibit. He's a French stone carver and Stopped in Belgium first and Christopher said well if you're going you have to go to Leon because it's so full of You know the really the gritty kind of inscriptions lots of inspiration for the Bodin's family Lettering comes from a place like this so this great. This is the epitaph of Apia Zoe from 259 AD and Her husband had this done for and he thought her an exceptional woman full of consideration for him and the sweetest of souls is what this says and You can see that it's in two pieces and these two pieces were you know lost to history and discovered one was discovered in 1832 and the other half was discovered in 1950 so more than a hundred years later and they put them together And I can't decide whether this was the piece was found first To give it exposure to the air and lost all its pain and this is the one they found second or if you know or the other way around who knows What happens to those pieces over? 118 years But they're together again just like Apia and her husband With the gods So a close-up of the of the the still painted side and this is a wall of the The stuff that captivates Dean and David Each one of these following ones and I'm gonna go through them a little bit fast I didn't get the information, but all of them are the the exuberance of Lettering amateurs, you know what amateur means right people who do things for the love of it and Really sassy letters everywhere so this is just you know You're doing this dance where it's take a picture sidestep take a picture sidestep Look at these these ours. It's like the Moulin Rouge chorus line and these ends so these ends are kicking you know, it's funny as I showed this I experimented on my students at Cabrillo with this last night and I was telling them we just done the Unchal a week or two ago And I was saying that you know early Unchals had the kick of the are sticking up Above the baseline Frequently and the ends as well. And so this one the ends hit the baseline, but not the ours and then this one The ours do make it almost down to the bottom, but the ends are staying high on the right side. The dance Is beautiful even when it's awkward Yeah, exactly Okay, and so while we're talking about letters that are not as carefully made Whether on purpose or not this is a marble inlay in the floor of the Vatican from 1966 and Look at this so this had to have been done on purpose to inlay the marble like that and The thing that definitely appeals to my The psychedelic side of me is these These are the the pillars the bronze pillars of Bernini's Baldecino the canopy over the papal altar in the Vatican 1623 to 34 and cast from bronze This is another fact I got from Dean cast from the bronze that was possibly liberated from the pantheon and different kind of pillars coming up here is this arm tattoo by Lady Sarah Sarah Laverne Laverrani, she's a tattoo artist in Bologna, and she was in my calligraphy class in Rome just a couple blocks from the from the Vatican also and She sacrificed her arm to a friend of hers and told him he could do whatever he wanted and he free-handed this on her arm While we're slumming here, I guess we this is in Naples one night while we were in Naples We just got on the the subway and picked a random exit and got off and we got off into a really dangerous neighborhood And we ended up having dinner in an alleyway This really turned out great the food was fantastic and it was just this little alley with tables sitting in the alley But this was some graffiti on the way back. You know hoping we could find that subway stop again And we were walking down the middle of the street. I'm telling you we were not walking near the alleys so On this trip. We started in Padua and these are the doors to the Palazzo Zabora a 19th century house, but you can see these were also Cast in bronze and both of these gentlemen are holding scrolls filled with these tiny Roman caps and It seemed to have been done in 1915 according to the door the corners all had These icons and different icons in each corner Padua is a wonderful place. There's three fantastic museums across the street from each other and The first one we're going to go to here is called Palazzo Zuckerman which is applied in decorative arts. And so there's two floors that is the museum with the Not so much paintings as the decorative arts and the top floor is the Bada Chin museum Which is totally devoted to this collection that a man named Nicola Bada Chin donated to The city of Padua in 1865 and they had this museum so Coins were a big part of it. So the orange coins are From the classical period first century and the ones on the black background are 20th century coins and I was just there were so many coins that I was just picking ones out and then I'd photograph the descriptive panel next to it and then Went on so that I could piece it together later and when I got home I realized that I had taken a picture of a Trajan coin an actual Trajan coin from You know from the first century in this great a shape online There isn't a picture of a coin one of these coins anywhere near the quality of this coin so I when I got back from The trip to Italy I was teaching in Kalamazoo, Michigan I showed some of these pictures and I said so I finally got this I finally got this Trajan coin and somebody in the classes Wow, what did that cost? And I said, you know, can you just imagine that? All the temples that have crumbled into the sea I'm gonna show you something that they dug out of the river fantastic building. They dug out of the river in Rome And this coin made it 2,000 years 1900 years in this kind of condition. How does that even happen? Life is so strange and wonderful. So these signs were actually done in the 1880s Around the 1880s sometime for the museum itself. So they were signs Advertised in the museum or identifying the museum and now there pieces in the museum So there was a lot of this beautiful woodwork. So this is a Sign that has it is three-dimensional But it's carved to look like you can see the shade like the letters are coming out at you Even though they're about this far off the they're just whoops move to the side a little bit So that's it straight on and you can make out the the shade on that the left edge of each stroke But it's a carved illusion. You know how many of those those painted illustrations of letters like this Or signs that look like this that are painted and here they actually carved one of them And there were cases around the the top floor of the museum that had woodwork Obviously by the same person or or else it was the style of the day Really beautiful stuff Also in Naples one of the most beautiful goal leaf signs. I've seen in all of Italy and I look for such things of course. This is a tobacco shop in a shopping mall So the guy saw me taking pictures of it and he actually knew about the sign He said it was done in the 1970s late 1970s and he didn't know who it was because he had bought the The shop from somebody else But do you know this sign, you know goal leaf process that the When you do a two-tone gold sign on glass you apply gold with water size Just big chunks of gold covering the areas that you're gonna That you're gonna have the outline and then you paint on the back All this is done on the inside of the glass you paint on the back The stuff that you want to stay on the the glass so the outline is Got special paint that stands up to washing and it also dries really quickly so you paint the outline on the back of the gold and When it dries you wash the window and every place that the gold is not protected by the paint it comes off So it's black paint on the back of this gold that's holding it onto the window then then you paint a clear varnish in the middle of it and And that's just like a glue you wait for it to get tacky and you press the gold into it so you can use two two different colors of gold and The outline is a mirror so when you walk down the street and you walk by a sign that has a Burnish outline that changes, you know Depending on what it's reflecting. Whereas the middle the matte center keeps the light no matter what it does And it keeps the true shape of the letter so this also has a blended shade on it as well just One layer my sign painting buddies in the letter heads would have what they call it a Double split blended shade But this is not split but it is blended how it goes from the the darker green to the lighter green on this maroon background so cool with these You know deco-ish letters Really nice, so we'll jump back in time then this is 1326 Back to Padua again This is an inscription from the church of San Lorenzo in Padua With these Lombardic caps and eccentric Ligatures and characters that I have no idea what they are. What the heck is that? Does anybody read this I Didn't think so So here's another one from the same museum and this one is even more wacky Look how lightweight the thin lines are and how heavy these are plus the the great spurs That the swelling strokes have the Rs the m's the ends. Oh And this one is 1422 a funerary inscription for a guy named Jacopo del Santo and this is from the church of San Francesco Also from Padua is the a floor mosaic from mid 4th century and it's a prayer for the room and I've only got two things from Venice. This is from a couple years ago Venice is a different animal than the rest of Europe. It seems that It doesn't go back as far so it it the graphics around there have a real different feel I Can't even tell if this says CA or LA Tintoretto Does it make more sense to say la? Ca what does that mean? Ah? Okay While I was in Venice though the last time I was in Venice I got taken to a gold leaf shop place where they're making gold leaf and it was Titians old studio and then it's now a gold leaf making shop I bought some fast fantastic hand-beaten gold that was done right in his studio and Then this gorgeous Carve sign on a church Also appeals to my psychedelic side if Grendel was telling the truth So this is a long story here. This is the thing that they found in the river This is buried under 12 feet of silt in the river and this is the oh You know what I didn't bring Try and remember this. This is the the era Pockeys which is the temple to Pox the the goddess of peace and it was done in oh man. I had all the facts. I Knew I forgot something What's that? Augustus yes, it was to celebrate him coming back from Hispania and golly was gone for three years and There isn't much lettering, but the how the carving is just exquisite and This was built on the river plane and over the centuries It was completely covered and they discovered they discovered this in got it. This was another one where they found pieces in The 1500s then they found them again in the 1800s and they There were reasons that they couldn't excavate it for because of existing buildings and they decided to finally go for it in 1903 and reconstructed it a Lot of planning up to that time Reconstructed it for a museum across the street from Augustus's mausoleum by the Mussolini government and Well, what was the architects name Montepurgo or something like that? I wish I had those notes anyway They started to build a museum to house this as a Tribute to Augustus and the the next thing that they did was when Augustus died he had written a big long his last will and testament and the rescue style his Deeds, how do you say Dean? Yeah, the matter of things it was just he described all his his professional life and is very long Treatise and they were Cast into plates in bronze plates that they put on the doors of his mausoleum and then they sent it out to the provinces To do the same thing That they were gonna dedicate these buildings and with his words all over the Roman Empire the Roman plates disappeared And so the only reason the only way we know that complete text of his You know his famous words were these three different temples in modern-day Turkey so this is from Ankara and And they were able to piece together the full thing they had three different versions of it or three different sections of it in these carved on the walls in Turkey and This is also part of the 1938 Restoration that they cast the letters in bronze and then did a rough carving into the stone into the marble and Inserted the letters in there So all these letters were carved in the stone and then the cast letters were put inside. So here's pictures of them doing this in 1938 Designed also by this this architect whose name I could tell you if I brought that piece of paper with me So really kind of rough I you know I I thought wow could there be this many stone carvers in Rome in 1938 but the the carving didn't have to be that exact because the bronze letters were gonna take care of most of that so the thing about it is that there were 15,000 115 letters so this is this is my friend Robin modeling scale for us and It goes on 15,000 letters hand carved in 1938 and then the war came along so this museum did not get completed and all this left from the 1938 version of the museum is this wall. That's that's it and this is directly across the street I mean if she turned around she'd be looking at Augustus's mausoleum, which is now under construction but So this is via Rapetta. So if she turned to her right and looked down the street. She'd see the the popolo What's the word I want the column Yeah Blocks and blocks down the way on the way up to the gardens So also in Rome This this church that I found this in is famous for being the home to the Caravaggio paintings of st. Matthew Which was one of his first major Commissions and we you know we were told to go there for the Caravaggio paintings and then I got caught by this fantastic carving All these letters are raised, you know So let's say they're three-eighths of an inch off the marble. So that means that this guy had to carve Down to the letters past the letters smooth out the letters I mean the the background and leave those things raised without the chisel catching those letters and knocking something off and look how many You know there's this is I've never carved marble, but this looks like a big task to me a big careful task It was done by a man named Des Vergne's would you say this in Italian des ver G NES? Can you see that? Oh, good looks better up on the screen than here And I think that's a ch in the front. So he could have been Charles or it could just be some CB it could be some Italian thing I don't understand but this is from 1900 Also in the same church was something that was a little bit simpler But still the same thing the letters were raised about a half of an inch So they had to carve down to that layer and then go past that layer and smooth it all out Really pretty amazing and you can see from this shot here that this vein of the marble. This is one piece of marble incredible Now of course when you go to Rome the Archaeological Museum in Rome it's directly across the street from the train station you just walk out the front door of the train station and Go directly across the street, and you'll go in the front door of the the museum. You can't miss the Me music museo naginale Romano and full of inscriptions this is this cute little urn was Let's see. Where are we? Earned for the ashes of cilia a pyre she was a Golden robe merchant and then her husband is the the name on the bottom of the urn in a completely different style So we kind of have a Herculaneum You know I don't want to say inspired by Herculaneum. Let's say a Herculaneum was inspired by this Frutiguer's typeface and then more classic Caps on the bottom. So this was first century AD use it was all they would say about the date on this and Here's a slab placed by Alpia Priscilla for her husband a fetus who is an Imperial freedman whose duty was to compile the guest list for the emperor and his title was invitator But you know so just the other day You know when they were mentioning Pat Blair in the the White House Collegiate first So I was imagining maybe he's writing the the the invites, you know doing the invitations and sending them out So this her husband was a freedman who Became the calligrapher for the emperor and it has a patera which just means bowl with a downflow of holes I don't know why they would need this but for this funerary slab and This is the lid for a slaves slave That the slave was so important to whoever his master was that they gave him his own slave And he liked him enough to make this urn. This is the top of the urn. It also has a hole in it. So You know perhaps you use it like a salt shaker I don't know but the letters are great. The letters are really great Okay, this is my favorite thing in the I really I think this is my favorite thing that I saw in the At least for this part of the slideshow This is a brick stamp From 146 AD and again Dean helped me a lot with the Translation of this and it's from the farm estate manner of something called for waters That could be the name of this farm and then the family name which is Annias the inner circle has a woman's name Faustina and the potter's name Sexty apri Silvini Every word and name in this is abbreviated every single one And the picture is a bust of mercury in his traveling cap Called a pet pet a sati with a caduceus behind him and his purse in front of him So all this help I need to say Gradius TB to Dean and David for helping we figure this out But the thing I love about this there were lots of these things that had this letter style Which is the ancestor of the Latin typeface, you know with wedge serifs and I asked even to get out one of the Type specimens from the letter form archive today and it's in the case in the back So you can see the modern-day version of it's always been one of my favorite kind of typefaces The Latin family of type and it definitely came right from this So here's this is one that you can see that this is stamped in clay So these these guys this the Annias family was probably Clay brick makers and they would stamp their work Although when I see this one it really feels like this is carved out of stone But if it was the stamp to press into the To make the impression in the brick it would have to have been backwards So it it must have been and this one is painted this one is not And here's one more with that letter style in a square one and these are all little things like about this all first century Rome no, this is second century. I'm sorry 146 One of my favorite things about Roman lettering that I noticed since I went is I love Strokes that don't have vertical serifs. So the ease the F's the T's they're all open going this way vertical Strokes have flat horizontal serifs, but there's no vertical serifs and it's something that I just love about This you know from this time period of lettering There's a tour of the scavi beneath the Vatican that you can go You know the main attraction there is that they take you by the mausoleum that they think held st. Peter's bones But it's in a cemetery and so it's full of these inscriptions and some of the most gorgeous letters in all of Rome And there's lots of this and they don't let you take pictures. So Next time I'm I'm gonna ask somebody if I can take some pictures But this one can you see the the scratch guidelines? So whether or not it was painted or carved they would scratch guidelines in it, you know, it's like Somebody should have invented a pencil for these people So this one is from a Decree of the Jewish community in Austria early first century And again the really wide ours. We see a lot of that There's a hint of vertical serifs over here on this E So it it wasn't every place but it was common to see those things being open This is a long poem from second century AD dedicated by a patron and perhaps lover of a freed woman Alia Podesta so her name is across the top Here it says potesta, but the translation They change it to a D for some reason the opening Dismannib or is is short for Dismannibus sacrum, which is to the mains or the departed spirits or ghosts or shades So frequently, you know a back on this last one here. This DM stands for this Dismannibus sacrum here. It's they've shortened it to Dismannib and Details here her name is done in you know, these flying horizontal strokes, which I'm just so in love with and Then the text itself is Slightly rustic slightly square caps All exuberance and this gorgeous thing, you know, this is my favorite piece that I saw in this trip Not that other crummy thing before This is this is a marble piece from Naples and it's three minutes municipal decrees honoring Tetyacasta, who is a priestess for a feminine cult? Possibly Demeter's the goddess of harvest and agriculture and you can see that it's done in Greek and It's been damaged over the years Where the The letters exposed the the stone and you can just imagine the structure of the stone being in like horizontal flakes So if it got any damage these things would pop off with just slim horizontal things and give us these fantastic new letters And look at these two a's they they got distressed in the same way The middle of this N is gone and this E is sort of sliding away and these two T's bookending each other It's you know, again the ravages of time. It's a wonderful thing What it's doing to letters that were beautiful in the first place and turning them into something that was not created by the hand of man It's a it's a lovely thing So this is also from Naples and it's not from Pompeii. This is from Puglioli, which is a modern-day Poseyoli and Puglioli comes from the Latin name Puglio to stink And it's built on a volcanic Caldera, so there's the sulfur smell is all over the place St. Paul landed there and lasted a week and said well, let's go to Rome, you know, because and this is a dedication to the emperor Domitian so it was done in 93 or 94 AD just 20 years before the Trajan column and It was put up in by the regio of the vikas Vistorianus and Calpurnianus, so, you know, it's no surprise that it stank but But the thing to notice here is that the the lettering changes it comes from the top at the top we've got classic Roman lettering very much like Trajan caps and down at the bottom look how stylized it got where the Bowl of the R turned into this perfect circle, so it reminds me of two things that one of my favorite things about Trajan style lettering is that center stroke coming out straight and not becoming part of the circle So here's three pieces by Cadditch where he points out He calls this the juncture one of the junctures the place where that Horizontal stroke hits the curve stroke and these two pieces from also from Cadditch Emphasize that even stronger that this is a straight horizontal stroke coming out from there So if and this is that top corner of the Domitian piece I'm sorry and down below. I want to show you this is Trajan This is Stevens titling and this is origami by Carl Crossgrove John Stevens Stevens titling so you can see that with Trajan they stylized it and they did round out that place or we're used to seeing it being round in an hour John caught the You know Cadditch's juncture and Carl Crossgrove one of the main design features of this beautiful face origami is that the Counterspaces in the round letters are rectangles and that's really kind of what is causing the juncture here But it really does echo the shape of these things so boy Do I love origami if he would just make small caps? I Would use it much more and Then here now we're going down to the lower part of that inscription where the stylizing and as soon as I saw this I thought about this this little wooden letter that I had gotten from a friend. It was broken I you know I fixed this in Photoshop, and then I thought oh you guys could should see what it really looks like Since we're talking about the ravages of time, but the roundness of the bottom of this bowl So, you know, it's not like I'm exclusively a flat mid stroke guy. It's a I like letters You know wherever It moves you so both these ours and let's go back for just a second I want to show you the full piece that very classic Roman caps at the top and then we get down to the The more stylized ones at the bottom Isn't that cool you got admit Okay, so let's go back in time This is we're going back to 1973 here. I my teacher at Humboldt State was reasonable and as Grendel mentioned that part was true and in 2005 I took calligraphy in 1973 at Humboldt State And in 2005 I was going to do a slideshow about The ghosts of calligraphy and I thought well I can make it personal it doesn't have to be famous people so I went and saw his son who is a printer in Berkeley David Bullen and To do some research to see what he had on his father And we're going through a box of stuff and I pull out this photograph This is 2005 30 years after my first calligraphy class and it was like my second calligraphy lesson I saw a picture of this thing. It's so beautiful that I remember the first day Roman caps We did straight stroke letters ease H's a's and V's second one was composite characters So this is my second calligraphy lesson It probably wasn't taking the day of my class, but it was that era. This is my classroom Really exciting thing and of course I heard about the Trajan column on the first day of My first calligraphy class And of course, you know the the famous caddage theory is that the letters were painted on stone Then the the carvers came along and the shape of our letters came from the brush not the chisel Etc. Etc. Here is You know another famous part of the origin of the serif of course is that Father Caddage was a sign painter in Chicago Before he entered the priesthood and started studying paleontology and So there's a chapter in origin of the serif about this but recently I took a picture of this watercolor study that Caddage did Paul Herrera had this and where he's talking about he's always said that a Roman Letter painter in a toga could get a job in a Chicago sign shop in the 1920s So he's making that comparison right here and saying that a Chicago sign painter could go back in time and get right on the crew that was Working on the on the column in any place else. I'm lingering here a little bit to give you a chance to read this Really pretty funny and then caddage loved to do what he called can't gyrations with a with the brush Meaning angle changes So these exercises here I just never seen them in watercolors like this this other one there was another piece With these watercolors where he had changed the color for each of the different strokes of the letter and notice this You know that he's not polishing these letters. He's making the stroke be the simple stroke and Oh before we get to that I was gonna show you his carving that he was faithful to those letters in his carvings Sometimes this is old Rick Menhart in his book now called Pismo where he's showing us caddage theory in two and a half inches and Not only is the brush Influencing the shape of the letter the silhouette of the letter. He's appearing to suggest that it's also Influencing the shape of the terminal in the carving as well so this is a Caddage slate in Rick Q6 living room It's on one wall and on this wall There's a caddage rubbing of the trajan of the inscription on the trajan column in his living room the light was so bad I couldn't get a good shot of it And I decided not to show you the bad shots But I did want to want you to see this letter Look at the gorgeous carving that we have here that he's really showing the flow of the brush with the With the point the deep point of the carving Coming in Really gorgeous this really bad low light So this is not the greatest one, but you can you can see the carving here and then We have some of his litho stone carvings from Reed College here as well so this is all carved and everything is painted except the ampersand is gilded and one of the things one of the points that he makes in origin of the serif and that we talked about a little bit in the article in the last alphabet is that caddage believed that Insized carvings should be very shallow and these stones at Reed you can see are just breathtakingly shallow I've carved wooden signs would you know incise carved letters in wood as well as I took a class from Paul Herrera and did slate once and Shallow is actually a little harder than deeper to keep it even to get through this and these stones at Reed are Fantastic and Andrea I I searched all over for my pictures of the stones that are upstairs in the Harrison Couldn't find those pictures So I'm not showing those things, but that gives you an excuse to go upstairs and see the two caddage stones that Are here in the library of the Harrison collection Here's an upside down shot of the painted letter and We'll come back to that but in all of these cases you can see just how shallow his carving is pretty amazing and as a Contrast here. I want to show you somebody who does carve deeply and this is Jean-Claude Lambeau the first time I Came to Lyon was I was really coming to see Lambeau's show had a tiny little show in Vovique which is at the same latitude as Lyon And I was coming to see that before Kristoffel said well, it's great You're coming to see Jean-Claude who was one of his teachers by the way But you've got to go to Lyon to see the carvings there So look how deep these are and if you're not familiar with Lambeau's stuff Well, I got another slideshow about him if you want to see that and He did really fantastic Combo characters and ligatures very inventive the letter forms were not that unusual He would take these classic forms and make them his own So his layout and his carving was so exciting. I'm sorry This is the only piece of his I'm going to show you but it's just for contrast This is a caddage slate in David Bullen's living room that obviously came from his father and here it's a handwriting called Petrarch which is Caddage's humanistic book hand Carved in slate and you'll notice with all the caddage of stuff. It's either gilded or painted and Here's those serifs again that we talked about Earlier in these the gilded caps so look at the carving here these these great little rectangles that create X's in the incision and this sideways movement and the last caddage thing I'll show you for now is another stone from From Reed the in the library at Reed And I thought this was just Something that he was working on on paper it looked like yellowed Bristol board or something like that And then I noticed up in the top that he started to carve this So this is a lithos stone and it says Reed written handwriting again named Petrarch and So I think he was saying that he wrote this on the stone with tush, I guess Using a pen and not a brush and started to carve and some something got in the way Just decided not to carve this so you have this great beginning of the carving and seeing his handwriting So here's a picture of my teacher on the left Reese Bullen and Father Caddage. This is 1973 in Eureka like two months after I picked up a calligraphy pen Lenore Katie and Reese Bullen brought Father Caddage to Eureka for workshops, so I so I signed up for a rewriting workshop with Father Caddage. Is that a big surprise to you, Kendall? And you know most of it went right over my head, but I do have to tell you that Two things I remember the first thing he said to us because it was about Reed pens was that to the true calligrapher Speedball is a dirty word and and then we we carved Reed pens and He carved Reed pens for us and we wrote a little bit. It was just a morning class It was set up that you could there were four workshops over two days and you could take all four Which would lead you to painting on stone and carving a little bit, but I could only afford it You know as a college student So I just took the morning class and left but the last thing he did was he painted on slate Gray slate with pink paint and a flat brush, and I had never seen anything so beautiful happen so fast This you know beautiful pink letters on slate and then he washed them right off I was like what are you doing? He goes well, you know, we'll do it again in the afternoon class You know you wanted to save the slate for that, but it did make an impression even though I wasn't ready Anyway, I'd all this is leading up to the fact that I've been hearing about the Trajan column all my calligraphy life and finally in 2001 I got a chance to go to To Rome couldn't wait to see it got there covered in scaffolding and also the rude awakening of finding out that they do not Let you down into the forum. I'd never I had no idea. I thought I was gonna be strolling up and You know getting a good look at these letters So we went back in 2004 the scaffolding was still up went back in 2012 It was down, but of course you can't get down inside and then on this last trip last summer Fate all kinds of luck happened. This is what it looks like on an August afternoon these days and We did get down inside the forum To see these things and get get some pictures. So here's Finally in all its glory the Trajan inscription. We'll just go closer and closer That you know if you've seen older pictures of it There were stains all down the right side and the scaffolding was up for the restoration of the column and especially the base and There has been acid rain Rain damage a lot of the carvings on the column itself and on the building are Shadows of what they used to be the lettering feels soft I have to say the lettering does feel soft But it was so beautiful to see it and the marble up close was a huge revelation. It was a Fantastic thing to get up. There was really one of the best days of my life Not to be too nerdy about stuff, but These the letters of course Cadditch says that they were there they were carved everything was carved for permanence, but It was also a vehicle to be painted. So this was the It's theorized and it's probable that the entire thing was painted. So Because of the volcano in Pompeii we can see some of these letters that still retain their pain inside almost always when you see pictures or you see anything painted the letters are painted red on the The white surface sometimes it's painted white We're gonna see we'll get to that painting part in a second. So this is the base and then it was explained to us that the The inscription is on what's called the sixth block with the sixth zone So you can see here that the construction is that at the base they run sideways The next one and two run this way three and four run this way five and six run this way seven and eight run this way so the sixth block is the full width of the column in the front and the five is in the back and This is I Just took this right out of National Geographic the April 2015 has a big story on the column and the history of the the wars itself They even go to Romania You know Trajan wiped out the civilization of the Dacians wiped it out and Took all the riches there were gold mines and you know this fabulous new wealth built Trajan's forum and the column and the column is celebrating the two wars that they had in 102 101 and 102 and then 105 and 106 then they came home with all this loot and built a column so So modern-day Romanians Find the column a real valuable thing so they can see what their ancestors look like or how they dressed anyway Because they're shown being slaughtered on the barber pole of the the column going up So the the inscription is not mentioned barely mentioned But you can see here that it's red letters on the white background and all the rest of it is painted this this of course is them You know colorizing their photographs for this and designing this there's a big five stretch pull-out poster of the Trajan column in it So if you can track that down, it's kind of cool to have The last thing here notice. There's no shadows on the on the inscription Our hostess Picked the time of day that we the light was the best for us to show up The inscription is tilted out about a half inch so that it makes it a little bit easier to see from this from the ground and Of course, it's famous that the top letters are taller than the bottom letters to make it feel like they're all the same size That's one theory the other one is that they The The top rows are more important information than the bottom rows So here's just a sense of scale. I also have another picture where When I took of some of the friends that were with us That made it feel much smaller so it really has to do with the angle of the camera, but I was in awe at that point and If you turn from where I was standing if you turn around and look To your right you're facing out. This is the Vittorio Emmanuel the wedding cake you know that at the bottom of via del corso and I wanted to get a picture of it from the Trajan column rather than a picture of the Trajan column from Vittorio Emmanuel, which is the way I always had to do it before And it's much it's more pretty this way, you know with these trees in the way so Down here in the corner. This is one of my You know participants in the the workshops that I taught in In Italy and she also set up the Rome workshop. This is Chiara Riva. So we're gonna finish up with some Lettering by these modern artists and so here's Chiara's work She's really young and she's only been doing calligraphy since 2012 and she really has A soul that sees beauty We spend a lot of time together with a pointed brush This is from last summer's. This is something she did in class it up in a bono in the north of Italy Where would they have a retreat the calligraphy of association the Italian calligraphy Association has a retreat in this monastery every year with different teachers So I taught there in 2015 and again this last time and Chiara was in the class and we were looking at Roger ex-cafans mistral as a influence for brush lettering here and She loved that Did terrific with that? Here's a recent one with a with these beautiful little caps as well as a You know more Italic caps for the background, but I love the The black caps here and this is a detail the one on the right is a detail of the next piece her last piece that we're going to see here so She seems to have been a calligrapher in a previous life and Next is Giovanna Di Faccio We hung out together in he teaches at a bono every year He's one of the founders of the Italian calligraphy Association and he teaches there every year the other teachers they bring in different folks every year, but he is there every year and He's he's a stone carver carver and a Type designer as well as one of Italy's preeminent calligraphers even though he now lives in Austria I think his wife is Austrian and he teaches calligraphy and type design at the new diet new Design University in St. Paulton, Austria And it's probably not an exaggeration to say that he's been That every Italian calligrapher in Italy today has been his student one way or another and Here's his rustic. This is from a instructional book that the Association put out Four or five years ago, and he did several of the plates along with other members of the of the group I love how clean this is and here's his unshell But he does modern work too And Here's some of his stonework besides the Mozart but those other three pieces are carved and this project He calls it the Littori project It's a manuscript on parchment using a quill pen only and mineral and vegetable pigments prepared at home according to ancient recipes so he's trying to be you know as Faithful to the old-time scribe as possible and it was a five-year project And I've got just six plates from the book each one is different even though the layout is very similar Each style is really different. I love this this wild one on the left Contrasted to the Italian handwriting on the right and here's his tight-faced Rialto I'm you know I'm a sucker for half-bracketed letters and these are really loudly half-bracketed you know, there's a bracket on the the left on the bottom and On the right at the top so it's it's kind of a reverse Caddage flow Caddage comes in from the from the left ends on the right But he's starting on the the right and ending on the left with his half-bracket here and one last look at Giovanni Giovanni's most famous student and this should remind you of him a little bit is Luca Barcellona and Luca has published so much. He's got the the beautiful book. He's all over the the web. He's this is a busy guy He really has become successful. Did you know he was a rapper first? He's part of a trio of rappers and he came to calligraphy through graffiti But Giovanni changed his life by introducing him to calligraphy. So now he does experimental, you know He has the influence from both fields And I thought I would show you something that you might not get to see when I visited him in Milan in 2012 He let me go through his flat files. So I just took pictures of things. He was goofing off on butcher paper with So each one of these is just cheap butcher paper with white and black paint all with a brush and You can see that very influenced by Giovanni and the Kant gyrations that Caddage talked about There's his brush is moving all over the place with this stuff and There's also a little linoleum cut book of his work I think that's oh and then you can also get Luca Barcellona wallpaper This is really there's a Website it's mentioned in the in the journal That you can order this piece of wallpaper and put it up on your there's a I think he's got three designs for them that you could order and then Finally our last artist. This is Elena Pelle Coro. She's from Turin and she is a character. She's classically trained as a Tromploi artist All kinds of practical painting stuff. So this carving is a painting So all of this is illustration. She there's lots of these ceilings where she paints decorative, you know, does decorative work on these ceilings This is a painted bookcase and Decorated furniture Along with a decorative cap, you know a painted This is a convex letter. It's coming out towards us not going in You can always tell if you're if you're ever trying to figure that out if the shadow is on the underside It's coming out at you if it's of the shadows on the top side of the strokes. It's supposed to be a con cut-in letter concave Cut and embossed she loves to emboss So she loves wacky modern stuff as well as classical. This is all cut paper Accordion fold book just gray and red and white paper this one has Primary colors only but a similar feeling to those kind of letters Scroll work painted scroll work another three-dimensional decorative letter of that age and This one when the first time I saw this This piece it was hanging in front of a bookcase So I thought she had cut it out of paper, but it turns out that it's just painted on acetate But so when I asked her about that she goes, oh that gives me an idea So I think we're gonna see this one cut out soon So traditional calligraphy over here, you know, she's come to calligraphy a little bit late a little bit later She's been doing all these decorative arts for so long in painting letters. The calligraphy is kind of new This is embossed and gilded But she's dynamite with a pen also. So this is pen work From our class in a bono this last summer and this is embossed work Here's a a cut accordion alphabet Cut on the left embossed on the right a cut fish in the middle So remember with embossing she's cutting all these things out of heavy board And then pressing the paper down into it. So all of it's cutting But papers a lot easier to cut than the board for embossing Intricate cutting here cutting and folding to get these letters to pop out at you So endlessly inventive endlessly looking for for stuff. This is a painted map and the most beautiful letter that I saw on this trip of this section of the slideshow is This s So painted scroll like circus scroll Lettering I flipped over this one so loud that it's now hanging in my house It's only about this big So I suppose This is this is from Giotto's Scriveny Chapel, which is right across the street from Palazzo Zuckerman in in Padua Padua or Padua I should say and so I hope we haven't got steam coming out of your eyeballs But I did want to leave you with one last thing. This is this is the way we closed Dean's Article in the journal and this is a funerary slab of maxima dated 525 ad With a cross at the beginning and a Christian palm at the end. This is Dean's words There is much to admire the cues that look like backward nines in Requisite and okay, where's requisite on the top. Yeah That's a that's a cue The small vowels the careful bars individual abbreviations the way lists was fit in Where's list fitting in there Dean? Second to the bottom. Yeah, right there and the overall liveliness The translation here rest in peace made servant of Christ maxima who lived 25 years or so She lived with her husband for seven years and six months. She was friendly faithful good to everyone and prudent So It's closing thoughts tonight. We said may we all be friendly faithful good to everyone and lively overall The prudence is up to you