Giovanni Battista Palatino

The cover of Libro nuovo d'imparare a scrivere

Giovanni Battista Palatino (c. 1515 - c. 1575), also known as Giambattista, was an Italian calligrapher. He was born in Rossano, Calabria, but moved to Rome as a young man. In 1538, Palatino acquired Roman citizenship, much to his pride. Palatino's Libro nuovo d'imparare a scrivere is the best-known Renaissance treatise on calligraphy. He dedicated it to the Academia dello sdegno (Academy of the Disdainful), of which he was secretary.^[1] As a calligrapher, Palatino was fascinated by ciphers and generally by the metamorphosis of the alphabet.^[2] The serif typeface designed by Hermann Zapf and released in 1948 was named after Giambattista Palatino.

References

1. Bolzoni 2011, p. 87.
2. Bolzoni 2011, p. 89.

Sources

• Bolzoni, Lidia (2011), The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press, University of Toronto Press, ISBN 0802043305