Development of Serif-Less Type in the eighteenth century.

Abstract

ETRVSCA Sans - The Primal 18th Century Sans.

This practice-based historical research identifies the architect John Soane’s inspiration and model for his serif-less letterforms deployed both as titling on drawings and for a number of his proposed inscriptions, throughout the last quarter of the eighteen-century. This typography revived the primitive letterforms of Republican Rome and the earlier pre-roman serif-less alphabets of the Etruscans and the Greeks.

Archival material, period books and antique print engravings were studied to provide the means to revive a typeface that is fully representative of eighteenth-century serif-less letterforms that were used to represent both the 'antique' and the neoclassical.

An increasing rationalist ideology for architecture focused upon the precedents of the Roman form evolved from the 1740s. This ‘primitivism’ focused upon the originality of Greek architecture as opposed to theories of an Etruscan origin that scholars had proffered since the late seventeenth-century. This academic debate resulted in Giovanni Battista Piranesi visually ‘demonstrating’ that Roman serifs were added to the lineal Etruscan letterform, in an attempt to re-exert his architectural ethos and the dominance of Italian classicism since the Renaissance.

In 1756 Piranesi completed the final plates of Le Antichità Romane to counter the growing argument of a Greek origin. Plate 25 Fig.1, plate 41 Fig.2-3, and the initial N to the section: ‘Explanation to the Aqueducts’ – all present a near mono-line and geometrical letterform without serifs. A capital ‘Etruscan E’ is highlighted on (Fig.3) the Plan of Nero's Nymphaeum with the addition of component serifs indicating the true source of the Roman letter.

This politicised debate continued, through the 1760s and 70s, producing a number of important engravings depicting letterforms from antiquity. These provided the source material for the revival of a primal eighteenth-century serif-less (Sans-serif) letterform, presented within the production of type specimens, an informative historical timeline, and a new typeface font – ‘ETRVSCA Sans’. Originally presented in production, at the annual international conference on type design: ATypI18 Type Legacies, in Antwerp – this font makes a pivotal contribution to type design evolution and the origin of sans serif modernist typography. This research was submitted within a Portfolio to the REF21.

ARRO: https://arro.anglia.ac.uk/view/creators/Melton%3D3AJon%3D3A%3D3A.html

Figshare: https://aru.figshare.com/articles/software/ETRVSCA_Sans_-_Font_Typeface_and_Type_Specimens/9772232

Researcher’s Website: http://emfoundry.com