Шрифт Bembo: Венецианский стиль эпохи Возрождения

Serif typeface in 1495 Venetian style

Bembo is a serif typeface created by the British branch of the Monotype Corporation in 1928–1929 and most commonly used for body text. It is a member of the "old style" of serif fonts, with its regular or roman style based on a design cut around 1495 by Francesco Griffo for Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, sometimes generically called the "Aldine roman". Bembo is named for Manutius's first publication with it, a small 1496 book by the poet and cleric Pietro Bembo. The italic is based on work by Giovanni Antonio Tagliente, a calligrapher who worked as a printer in the 1520s, after the time of Manutius and Griffo. Monotype created Bembo during a period of renewed interest in the printing of the Italian Renaissance, under the influence of Monotype executive and printing historian Stanley Morison. It followed a previous more faithful revival of Manutius's work, Poliphilus, whose reputation it largely eclipsed. Monotype also created a second, much more eccentric italic for it to the design of calligrapher Alfred Fairbank, which also did not receive the same attention as the normal version of Bembo. Since its creation, Bembo has enjoyed continuing popularity as an attractive, legible book typeface. Prominent users of Bembo have included Penguin Books, the Everyman's Library series, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, the National Gallery, Yale University Press and Edward Tufte. Bembo has been released in versions for phototypesetting and in several revivals as digital fonts by Monotype and other companies.

The regular (roman) style of Bembo is based on Griffo's typeface for Manutius. Griffo, sometimes called Francesco da Bologna (of Bologna), was an engraver who created designs by cutting punches in steel. These were used as a master to stamp matrices, the moulds used to cast metal type. Manutius at first printed works only in Greek. His first printing in the Latin alphabet, in February 1496 (1495 by the Venetian calendar), was a book entitled Petri Bembi de Aetna Angelum Chabrielem liber. This book, usually now called De Aetna, was a short 60 page text about a journey to Mount Etna, written by the young Italian humanist poet Pietro Bembo, who would later become a Cardinal, secretary to Pope Leo X and lover of Lucrezia Borgia. Griffo was one of the first punchcutters to fully express the character of the humanist hand that contemporaries preferred for manuscripts of classics and literary texts, in distinction to the book hand humanists dismissed as a gothic hand or the everyday chancery hand. One of the main characteristics that distinguished Griffo's work from most of the earlier "Venetian" tradition of roman type by Nicolas Jenson and others is the now normal horizontal cross stroke of the "e", a letterform which Manutius popularised. Modern font designer Robert Slimbach has described Griffo's work as a breakthrough leading to an "ideal balance of beauty and functionality", as earlier has Harry Carter. The type is sometimes known as the "Aldine roman" after Manutius' name. Historian Beatrice Warde suggested in the 1920s that its influence may have been due to the high quality of printing shown in the original De Aetna volume, perhaps created as a small pilot project. De Aetna was printed using a mixture of alternate characters, perhaps as an experiment, which included a lower case p in the same style as the capital letter with a flat top. In 1499, Griffo recut the capitals, changing the appearance of the typeface slightly. This version was used to print Manutius' famous illustrated volume Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Griffo's roman typeface, with several replacements of the capitals, continued to be used by Manutius's company until the 1550s, when a refresh of its equipment brought in French typefaces which had been created by Garamond, Pierre Haultin and Robert Granjon under its influence. UCLA curators, who maintain a large collection of Manutius's printing, have described this as a "wholesale change  the press followed precedent; popular in France, [these] types rapidly spread over western Europe". They returned to popularity later in the century, with the arrival of the Arts and Crafts movement. In 1500, Manutius released the first books printed using italic type, again designed by Griffo. This was originally not intended as a complementary design, as is used today, but rather as an alternative, more informal typeface suitable for small volumes.

Bembo's italic is not based directly on the work of Griffo, but on the work of calligrapher and handwriting teacher Giovanni Antonio Tagliente (sometimes written Giovannantonio). He published a writing manual, The True Art of Excellent Writing, in Venice in 1524, after the time of Manutius and Griffo, with engravings and some text set in an italic typeface presumably based on his calligraphy. efn|This is a shortened form of the full title.) It too was imitated in France, with imitations appearing from 1528 onwards. In italic, the k has an elegantly curved stroke in the lower right and descenders on the p, q and y end with a flat horizontal stroke. In the 1950s, Monotype noted that its features included: "serifs fine slab, fine bracketed and in l. c. prolonged to right along baseline." This meant that many of the serifs (especially the horizontals, for example on the W) are fine lines of quite uniform width, rather than forming an obvious curve leading into the main form of the letter. The ascenders reach above the cap height. In metal type, Bembo includes two capital "R"s, one with a long, extended leg following Griffo's original engraving, and another with a more tucked in leg for body text if a printer preferred it. Bembo does not attempt to strictly copy all the features of Renaissance printing, instead blending them with a twentieth century sensibility and the expectations of contemporary design. An eccentricity of Griffo's first De Aetna capitals was an asymmetrical M that does not seem to have a serif at top right. So odd it has been suggested it may have been the result of faulty casting of type, it was nonetheless often copied in French imitations by Garamond and his contemporaries. It was used in a British Museum exhibition catalogue. efn|A more muted form of it is used in Hermann Zapf's Palatino. Historian James Mosley reports that other changes from the earliest versions were reduction in the weight of the capitals and alteration of the 'G' by adding the conventional right hand serif, and widening the 'e', and suggests that the numerals of Bembo were based on those Monotype had already developed for the typeface Plantin. Book designer Elizabeth Friedländer drew some rarely seen swash capitals for Bembo for capital introductions to Churchill's history of the second world war.

Monotype had already designed two other types inspired by the same period of Italian printing and calligraphy, the roman Poliphilus and italic Blado (both 1923). Made more eccentric and irregular than the sleek lines of Bembo to evoke the feel of antique printing, these remained in Monotype's catalogue and have been digitised, but are much less known today. Bembo can therefore be seen as an iteration of a preexisting design concept towards mass market appeal, taking the basic idea of the Griffo design and (unlike Poliphilus) updating its appearance to match the more sophisticated printing possible by the 1920s. Bembo's original working name was "Poliphilus Modernised". Poliphilus is named after the book Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, one of Manutius's most famous books in the Latin alphabet, which was printed with the same roman as De Aetna but recut capitals; it was made for the Medici Society, who planned to create an English translation. Morison preferred Bembo's roman and was somewhat dismissive of Poliphilus. Its roman is based on a slightly earlier period of Italian renaissance printing than Bembo, the work of Nicolas Jenson in Venice around 1470. Like Bembo, its italic (by Frederic Warde) comes from the 1520s, being again loosely based on the work of Arrighi from around 1520. Compared to Bembo it is somewhat lighter in structure, something particularly true in its digital facsimile. Penguin often used it for headings and titles of 'classic' editions, particularly its capitals and italic; its lower case does not so effectively harmonise with Bembo due to the different letter shapes such as the tilted 'e'.

Although Bembo went on to dominate British book printing in the twentieth century, in the words of John Dreyfus "Morison was not entirely satisfied by the way Griffo's roman had been recut", feeling that "the real charm of the original had not been brought out in the mechanical recutting". In the hot metal type era Monotype also issued a titling version of Centaur, which was often used by Penguin; Monotype's digitisations of Centaur do not include it.

1910s The italic calligraphy style of the Italian renaissance is revived by calligraphers including Edward Johnston and Alfred Fairbank.

[[File:Bembo large. jpg|thumb|Two larger sizes of Bembo, at 60 and 72 pt. Different drawings were used in the metal type period at sizes larger than 24 point, and the greater delicacy is clear. Cambridge University Press's history describes Bembo as one of its most commonly used typefaces; Morison was closely connected to Cambridge and his personal archive (as well as much of Monotype's) went to the university after his death. Among reviews of typefaces, writing in the anthology Typographic Specimens: The Great Typefaces, Jeff Price commented that Bembo became noted for its ability to "provide a text that is extremely consistent in colour", helping it to "remain one of the most popular book types since its release". Roger Black commented in 1983 "For me, Bembo is the all time classic roman; if I were stuck on a desert island with only one typeface, that would be it." Digital font designer Nick Shinn has also commented, "Bembo has a sleek magnificence, born of high precision technology at the service of accomplished production skills, which honours the spirit of the original, and an exotic grace of line which humbles most new designs made more ostensibly for the new technology." Oxford University Press editor John Bell also borrowed the name for his set of comic verse lampooning publishing, Mutiny on the Bembo.

thumb|right|Large composition matrix case with Bembo 270 16 roman, prepared for casting with a standard wedge S5 13.75 set. Hot metal typesetting systems cast type using machine made matrices under the control of a keyboard. thumb|A Monotype machine keyboard; the characters to be printed are recorded on a paper reel at the top. thumb|right|Large composition matrix case with Bembo 270 24 pt roman, 19.5 set
thumb|A Monotype caster, used to cast metal type.

Monotype has released two separate digitisations named Bembo and more recently Bembo Book, as well as the more slender caps only display font Bembo Titling and the alternate italic design Fairbank. Bembo Book is considered to be superior by being thicker and more suitable for body text, as well as for offering the alternate shorter R for better spaced body text. Monotype's original, early digitisation of Bembo was widely seen as unsuccessful. Two main problems have been cited with it: being digitised from drawings, it was much lighter in type colour than the original metal type which gained weight through ink spread, much reduced on modern printing equipment. In addition, the digital Bembo was based on the 9 pt metal drawings, creating a font with different proportions to the metal type in the point sizes at which Bembo was most often used in books; Sebastian Carter has pointed particularly to the 'M' being drawn too wide. efn|Many early typeface digitisations now look too light even when they were digitised from the original metal type drawings. The type was made lighter than the desired appearance on paper to take account of the fact that the ink would spread as it soaked into the paper. However, modern printing methods show less ink spread than metal type. Future Monotype executive Akira Kobayashi commented that the original digitisation was "a kind of compromise  the types that were originally designed for hot metal often looked too light and feeble  Bembo Book is more or less what I expected." While Bembo Book is considered the superior digitisation, the original continues to offer the advantages of two extra weights (semi and extra bold) and infant styles with simplified a and g characters resembling handwriting; its lighter appearance may also be of use on printing equipment with greater ink spread. Cross licensing has meant that it is sold by a range of vendors, often at very low prices. As an example of this, Fontsite obtained the rights to resell a derivative of the original digitisation, using the alternative name Borgia and Bergamo, upgrading it by additional OpenType features such as small capitals and historical alternative characters. Neither version includes digitisations of the larger size versions of Bembo, which had a more delicate and elegant design. Intended as a unified serif design supporting Roman, Greek and a range of Cyrillic alphabets such as Serbian, it features a more calligraphic italic than Bembo with swash capitals and support for Greek ligatures. A looser interpretation of the Griffo designs is Iowan Old Style, designed by John Downer and also released by Bitstream. With a larger x height (taller lower case letters) than the print oriented Bembo and influences of signpainting (Downer's former profession), it was intended to be particularly clear for reading at distance, in displays and in signage. It is a default font in the Apple Books application. Not explicitly influenced by Bembo but also influenced by Griffo is Minion by Slimbach. Released by Adobe, a 2008 survey ranked it as one of the most popular typefaces used in modern fine printing. Besides designs with similar inspiration, a number of unofficial releases and digitisations of Bembo have been made in the phototypesetting and digital periods, reflecting the lack of effective intellectual property protection for typefaces. Several unofficial versions were released during the phototypesetting period under alternate names; for example one unofficial phototypesetting version was named "Biretta" after the hat worn by Roman Catholic clergy, and another by Erhard Kaiser was created for the East German printing concern Typoart, outside the reach of Western intellectual property laws. In the digital period, Rubicon created a version named "Bentley" intended for small sizes and Bitstream made a version under the name of "Aldine 401". Its licensee ParaType later created a set of Cyrillic characters for this in 2008. The name "Bembo" remains a Monotype trademark and may not be used to describe such clones.

Two open source designs based on Bembo are Cardo and ET Book. The Cardo fonts, developed by David J. Perry for use in classical scholarship and also including Greek and Hebrew, are freely available under the SIL Open Font License. Unimpressed by the first Bembo digitisation, statistician and designer Edward Tufte commissioned an alternative digitisation for his books in a limited range of styles and languages, sometimes called 'ET Bembo'. He released it publicly as an open source font named 'ET Book' in September 2015.

Meggs, Philip B. and McKelvey, Roy. Revival of the Fittest: Digital Versions of Classic Typefaces. RC Publications: 2000. Meggs, Philip B. History of Graphic Design. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: 1998.