Calligraphy

Or the art of beautiful writing

Calligraphy (from Greek kallos "beauty" + graphẽ "writing") is the art of beautiful writing.

The earliest forms of calligraphy date back to cave-man paintings. Up until roughly 1440 AD, before the printing press was around, calligraphy was the way books and other publications were made. A scribe had to handwrite every individual copy of every book or publication. The handwriting was done with a quill and ink onto parchment or vellum. The lettering styles used throughout the ages include Rustic, Carolingian, Blackletter, etc. Perhaps the most common place where the average person will run across calligraphy today is on wedding invitations. This style is becoming increasing popular again with many people making personalized cards.

There are three main styles of calligraphy:

• Western or Roman

• Arabic

• Chinese or Oriental

Calligraphy ranges from functional hand lettered inscriptions and designs to fine art pieces where the abstract expression of the handwritten mark may or may not supersede the legibility of the letters (Mediavilla 1996). Classical calligraphy differs from typography and non-classical hand-lettering, though a calligrapher may create all of these; characters are historically disciplined yet fluid and spontaneous, improvised at the moment of writing (Pott 2006 & 2005; Zapf 2007 & 2006).

Calligraphy continues to flourish in the forms of wedding and event invitations, font design/ typography, original hand-lettered logo design, religious art, various announcements/ graphic design/ commissioned calligraphic art, cut stone inscriptions, memorial documents, props and moving images for film and television.

Example: http://www.bev-powis-calligrapher.co.uk/html/laugh_often.html

Historical evolution of Western calligraphy:

 

Western calligraphy is recognizable by the use of the Roman alphabet. The first Roman alphabet appeared about 600BC, in Rome. About the first century we can see Roman square capitals carved on stones, Rustic capitals painted on walls, and Roman cursive for daily use. This trend continued into the second and third centuries using the Uncial, however writing withdrew to monasteries and was preserved there during the fourth and fifth centuries, when the Roman Empire finally fell and Europe entered the Dark Ages.

At the height of the Roman Empire its power reached as far as Great Britain, when the empire fell, its literary influence remained. The Semi-uncial generated the Irish Semi-uncial, the small Anglo-Saxon.

The raising of the Carolingian Empire encouraged to set a new standardized script, developed by several famous monasteries (Corbie Abbey, Beauvais,...) around the eighth century, it's finally the script from Saint Martin de Tours which is set as the new Imperial standard, named the Carolingian script (or "the Caroline").

About the seventh century, the Caroline evolved into the Gothic script, more cursive and for daily use. After the invention of Gutenberg (1455), the Gutenberg script spread across Europe.

In the sixteenth century, the rediscovery of old Carolingian texts encouraged the creation of the Antiqua script (about 1470). The seventeenth century saw the Batarde script from France, and the eighteenth century saw the English script spread across Europe and world by their books.

Western calligraphy has some special features, such as the illumination of the first letter of each page in medieval times, either by making it bigger, colored, and/or more complex.

As Chinese or Arabian calligraphies, western calligraphic script had strict rules and shapes. The quality of a text was according to the regularity of the letters, and the "geometrical" good order of the lines on the pages. Each character had, and still has, a precise stroke order.

Current Modern Western calligraphy has evolved into an art where creativity is paramount, allowing use of highly colored and/or cursive characters; irregularity in the characters' size, style, colors, etc. while the sentences may commonly curves or crossing each other to add odd visual effects.