Humanist minuscule

"A humanist manuscript was intended to suggest its contents by its look," Martin Davies has noted: "old wine in new bottles, or the very latest vintage in stylish new dress".

[5] In Petrarch's compact book hand, the wider leading and reduced compression and round curves are early manifestations of the reaction against the crabbed Gothic secretarial minuscule we know today as "blackletter".

The Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci recalled later in the century that Poggio had been a very fine calligrapher of lettera antica and had transcribed texts to support himself— presumably, as Martin Davies points out—[10] before he went to Rome in 1403 to begin his career in the papal curia.

Calligraphic forms of this "chancery italic" were popularized by the famous Roman writing master Ludovico Arrighi in the early sixteenth century.

[14] In the history of Western typography humanist minuscule gained prominence as a model for the typesetter's roman typeface, as it was standardized by Aldus Manutius, who introduced his revolutionary italic typeface based on the chancery hand in Venice, 1501, and was practised by designer-printers Nicolas Jenson and Francesco Griffo; roman type has helped establish the remarkable resistance to change of the modern Latin alphabet.