USA in 1915 under the name of Centaur. Also in Venice,
Aldus MANUTIUScommissioned a highly successful roman
face which he used in 1495 to publish a tract by Pietro
BEMBO; the 20th-century adaptation of the face, still called
Bembo, is much used in modern bookwork. Another
beautiful and long-lived Aldine type design, a recutting of
the face used in the Bembo tract, is Poliphilus, called after
one of Aldus’s most famous publications, the HYPNEROTO-
MACHIA POLIFILI(1499). The third family of typefaces, the
italic, was also an Aldine introduction (1501); with its nu-
merous ligatures, it was an attempt to imitate yet another
form of humanist script. A rather different italic fount,
with numerous modern descendants, was designed in
1523 by the papal calligrapher Ludovico Arrighi, who de-
rived it from the chancery hand of the papal scribes. After
Arrighi’s death in the Sack of Rome (1527), the Roman
printer Antonio Blado (1490–1567) developed the simpler
of Arrighi’s designs, which had first appeared in 1526; this
face, now called Blado, is still used as the italic counter-
part of Poliphilus.
Aldine roman and italic types were greatly admired
and imitated with differing degrees of competence all over
Italy and France. Typeface usage varied from country to
country; in 16th-century Italy, for instance, whole books
were often printed in italic, but elsewhere, as in modern
practice, italic faces were mainly used as differentiation
types. In northern Europe black-letter founts remained
the norm for the early years of the 16th century but the
greater legibility of roman ensured its ultimate predomi-
nance. This came about at different speeds in different
countries: in England, for example, works in Latin were
often printed in roman, but those in the vernacular were
generally in black-letter until the 1580s, after which
roman gradually superseded it except in ballads and inex-
pensive prose items, which continued to be printed in
black-letter until the mid-17th century. In Germany black-
letter fonts remained the standard throughout the period,
although as early as 1467 the Strasbourg printer Adolph
Rusch had used his own pure roman type for the first
printed edition of Rabanns Maurus’s encyclopedia De uni-
verso.
Further reading: Harry Carter, A View of Early Typog-
raphy Up To About 1600 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Archi-
tectural Press, repr. 2002); Daniel Berkeley Updike,
Printing Types: Their History, Forms and Use (New York:
Dover, 1980; repr. Oak Knoll, 2001).ttyyppooggrraapphhyy 4 47777