Compendio del gran volume dell’arte del bene, & leggiadramente Scriuere tutte le forti di lettere e caratteri.

Giovanni Battista Palatino.

Compendio del gran volume dell’arte del bene, & leggiadramente Scriuere tutte le forti di lettere e caratteri.

Venice:

Aluise Sessa,

1588.

In this later edition of an early and important 1540 manual on handwriting by Giovanni Battista Palatino (ca. 1515–ca. 1575), the Italian calligrapher presents some of the world’s alphabets, including Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Arabic, as well as many of the scripts used in the European courts and chancelleries of his day. Here Palatino reproduces in woodcut his manuscript specimen of Cancellaresca Romana script; the text is an excerpt from Boccaccio’s novel Il filocolo (1335–1336).

From the collection of Rare Book School