Giambattista Bodoni

He is even more admired as a compositor than as a type designer, as the large range of sizes which he cut enabled him to compose his pages with the greatest possible subtlety of spacing.

Bodoni achieved an unprecedented level of technical refinement, allowing him to faithfully reproduce letterforms with very thin "hairlines", standing in sharp contrast to the thicker lines constituting the main stems of the characters.

[3] This style attracted many admirers and imitators, surpassing the popularity of French typographers such as Philippe Grandjean and Pierre Simon Fournier.

In Rome, Bodoni found work as an assistant compositor (typesetter) at the press of the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (The Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples), the missionary arm of the Vatican.

Saddened by the death of Spinelli and Ruggieri's tragic suicide, and encouraged by British friends, he left Rome for England, a country which, under the influence of Baskerville whose books were much admired on the Continent, had become a leader in printing innovation.

[a] Bodoni's plan was summarily scotched by sickness; on his journey north, he succumbed to Tertian fever[9] (malaria), and returned home to Saluzzo to recuperate.

"As an example of its kind, it remains unsurpassed in its beauty and printing technique, and it showed the rest of Europe that the young Italian was a printer to be reckoned with.

Several major presentation volumes would follow, along with the various publications required by the court: announcements, invitations, posters, and many sonnets written by those who wished their work to be printed by the great Bodoni.

Bodoni had no desire to leave comfortable Parma, where he had just married (at the age of 51) Margherita Dall’Aglio, a local woman 18 years his junior.

He remained in Parma for the rest of his life, running both ducal and private presses, and printing editions of the classics for Azara and other patrons.

In the years following 1791, Bodoni produced much of his greatest work, including the great classics of Horace, Virgil, Anacreon, Tasso, and Homer, among others.

In 1805, even the emperor Napoleon and empress Josephine visited the city and asked to see him; alas, that very day Bodoni was confined to bed with a disastrous attack of gout, a disease that was to plague him until the end of his life.

On his trip to Paris to crown Napoleon emperor, Pope Pius VII had been impressed by a copy of Jean-Joseph Marcel's "Oratio Dominica", which contained the Lord's Prayer in 150 languages.

Before his death on 30 November 1813, Bodoni had started work on a series of French classics for his new patron, Joachim Murat, Napoleon's brother-in-law.