History
Griffo cut punches for the Venetian press of the humanist printer Aldus Manutius. The face was first used in February 1496 (1495 more veneto), in the setting of a book entitled Petri Bembi de Aetna Angelum Chalabrilem liber, a 60-page text about a journey to Mount Aetna written by the young Italian humanist poet Pietro Bembo, later a Cardinal and secretary to Pope Leo X.
Six years later Griffo was responsible for the first italic types, cut for Aldus.
A second version of the roman face followed in 1499 and this type was used to print the famous illustrated Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. This typeface served as a source of inspiration for typefaces of the Parisian typefounder Claude Garamond, for Voskens and many others, which were themselves the sources for Caslon types and many other European types of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Griffo was the first punch-cutter to fully express the character of the humanist hand that contemporaries preferred for manuscripts of classics and literary texts, in distinction to the book hand humanists dismissed as a gothic hand or the everyday chancery hand. The typeface called Bembo has a calligraphic feel that is particularly evident in the serifs. It has a delicate transitional curve that rises up into the stem of each letter. Many lowercase letters exhibit hints of sinuous curves reminiscent of those generated by hand-drawn letters; the termination of the arm of both the r and the e flare slightly upward and outward. The lowercase c has a subtle forward slant, a reversal of the oblique stress of the o. Characters h, m, and n have a slight returned curve on their final stem. Lowercase italic k has an elegantly curved stroke in the lower-right. One of the main characteristic that distinguished Griffo's types from earlier Venetian forms is the way in which the ascenders of the lowercase letters stand taller than the capitals. An infant variety also exists, which contains single-story versions of the letters A and G.
According to the authors of Typographic Specimens: The Great Typefaces, Bembo is noted for its ability to "provide a text that is extremely consistent in color and texture," helping it to "remain one of the most popular book types since its release."
Read more about this topic: Bembo
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