January Exertions with Lucas Materot and Les Oeuvres
A bit of Personal History & New Yearās Intentions
Hello friends.
When I was a kid, I was gifted a magical book filled with all kinds of beautiful, fancy writing. I couldnāt read most of the text printed on the pages, but I was fascinated by all the different styles of markings and letterforms. I loved the broad, rounded shapes of Uncial and promptly began trying to copy them for myself. Soon enough, I was filling pages with Italic, Roman, and Gothic hands as well.
At this time in the early 90ās, it was sometimes hard for me to locate books and additional calligraphy-related resources. One of my favorite things about the expansion of the internet and tech throughout my lifetime thus far has been the initiatives taken by many cultural institutions and libraries to provide free, public access to so many of the materials in their digital archives. Centuries-old manuscripts and calligraphic training manuals are now available to see in high resolution at any hour of the day with the click of a button. These materials have been invaluable to my development as a calligrapher, but recently Iāve been struggling to make time for study. This year, Iām making a conscious effort to change that. Every month, Iām going to choose a manuscript, book, or other long-form piece of calligraphic writing to focus on.
This kind of research has always been a largely solitary endeavor for me, but I thought some of you out there might want to join me. Out of this thought grew the idea for a blog or a newsletter of some sort. So, that is what this is.Ā Around the end of every month, Iāll put together a little update on what Iāve been studying.
If youād like to follow along, please sign up for my mailing list.
A month with Materot
For this first installment, I want to share an early 17th century French copybook, Les Oeuvres de Lucas Materot Bourguinon, Francois, Citoyen DāAvignon:Ā OĆ¹ l'on comprendra facilement la maniĆØre de bien et proprement escrire toute sorte de lettre italienne selon l'usage de ce siĆØcle. For non-French speakersāor those of you like myself who have long forgotten the little bit of French you learned in high schoolāthe English translation is The Works of Lucas Materot Bourguinon, French Citizen of Avignon:Ā Where we will easily understand how to write well and properly all kinds of Italian letters according to the usage of this century. Itās usually referenced just by the shortened Les Oeuvres de Lucas Materot.Ā
The BnF Gallica collection has an excellent digital copy available here: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b86220474.
This book is not a manuscript. Itās a monograph printed from hand-engraved copper plates. To my knowledge, none of the calligraphic artwork or original printing plates have survived. This is common for copybooks from this timeframe.
If youāre not familiar with them, copybooks are a bit of a genre unto themselves. I am decidedly not a historian, but to my understanding, the spread of this style of book resulted from numerous circumstances in Europe that were kicked off in the 1400s with the invention of the moveable type printing press, along with improvements in copper plate engraving techniques for printing.Ā
Throughout the following centuries literacy and the availability of books expanded greatly. Demand for instruction on how to write went up, and writing masters seized upon engraverās ability to fairly accurately reproduce handwriting for print as a means to expand their audience and client/student base. The books they produced were promoted as training manuals, but they were also released into competitive environments, so the books also functioned as showcases of a writing masterās superior skill. Many feature elaborate, decorative borders and excessively flourished lettering in addition to script exemplars and writing samples.
I think itās always important to keep in mind when looking at these books that the lettering is all engraving, not actual calligraphy. Everything is at least two steps away from the handwriting itās based upon (if not more when you start to factor in how much editing may have gone into laying out each page prior to engraving and printing).Ā
Outside of the copybooks, these scripts were written with hand-cut quills (not metal nibs like we have now) by people of all different skill levels, the majority of whom were more concerned with the content of what they were writing than they were with each letter they produced being the most perfect icon of that letter they were capable of. Put simply, I donāt think most peopleās writing was as clean and āperfectā as whatās engraved in these copybooks. I do, however, think that highly talented scribes and writing masters would have been quite capable of producing work very close in quality when they took their time and focused on perfection over speed. These were people who dedicated their lives to writing, and itās amazing what some people can do with a lifetime of practice.Ā
Materotās Les Oeuvres fits perfectly into this writing master copybook niche. I donāt know much about him beyond the fact that he was a scribe in the chancery at Avignon. The book is entirely dedicated to French-centric variations of the cancellaresca scripts spreading out from Italy and the papal chancery in the decades leading up to its publication.
The title page is a mass of engraved flourishing, the main title itself barely legible, made up of all capital letters buried in squiggly spaghetti lines. This showy stuff is not really to my taste, but the subtitle is done in a lovely Italian handāthis is what Iām here for with this book and Materotās work in general.Ā
Following the title page there are several pages of text printed in dense moveable type. As I already mentioned, my French is minimal, but from what I can gather from memory and Google Translate, the writing here is from other people extolling the tremendous beauty and god/demon-like glory of Materotās skill as a scribe. I think these are predecessors of the peer and industry reviews we find on the backs of contemporary books and novels.
After the reviews there are several more pages of typeset explanatory text which I assume is from Materot himself. It discusses a bit about the virtues of writing, and then goes into more practical matters such as how to choose and cut quills, etcā¦ Again, this is not really what I value about this book. What I love is the roughly 50 plates that follow.Ā
The primary focus of Les Oeuvres is clearly Materotās take on cancellaresca. By my count, at least half of the plates are dedicated to it. When I first started digging through these kinds of books, I had a hard time connecting these script styles that I thought of as āItalian handā to what I thought of as cancellarescaāa predecessor to modern italicāspecifically cancellaresca (or chancery cursive) in the style of Arrighi as found in La Operina. The connection clicked for me when I learned a bit more about the history of the script and itās development as it spread through Europe along with the shifting print methods used in this general period.
Italian hand and Italic as we know them today didnāt exist at this point. Arrighiās cancellaresca is earlier. La Operina was published in 1522 and is printed via woodcut blocks. Les Oeuvres was printed almost 90 years later in 1608 with engraved metal plates capable of producing delicate curved lines and fine detail thatās just not possible with woodblock printing. The script itself has developed, from a slower, more formal style with few connected letters into a much more cursive style prioritizing speed and connection of movement from one letter to the next. The line weight, fluidity, and delicacy of the script have changed, but the core foundational elements are still there.
Materot begins the book proper with three plates detailing isolated letters and the basic forms of his cancellaresca (āchanceleresqueā throughout the book). Page 10 covers lowercase letters. He starts with the core lozenge/rounded almond form and then runs through most of the letters (including variants) in roughly alphabetical order.Ā
There are three key things I notice immediately. The script is fairly vertical, written at a roughly 70Ā° slant. Itās narrow, most of the letters look to have around a 1:2 width-to-height ratio. The line work is lightweight and almost monoline. It looks like a little extra pressure is applied when beginning or transitioning into down strokes, see the shoulders of the hās, mās and nās, etcā¦ plus the iās and the tās. Thereās also a bit of extra weight in a few places where a line logically overlaps when a letter is written in an unbroken stroke, see the stem bases of the hās, mās, nās, rās, etcā¦ These slight variations make sense to me when thinking that these letters are to be written with a point cut quill. Light pressure is applied for ink flow when coming off an upstroke, and then the ink also lays down a bit more heavily where lines are retraced.Ā
The delicate quality of the main lettering of the script is offset by heavily blobbed or swashed ascenders, descenders, and a few little heavy, filled accents on letters like b, c, a few e variants, s, etcā¦ A lot of discussion has gone on about how these kinds of big blobbed/clubbed ascenders are accomplished. Based on the proportions here, I would guess that Materot just fills his in after the fact, like you might do for an i-dot. The swashed ascenders and descenders are probably done with a single, pressurized stroke though.
I have to call out the lovely and simple but elegant ampersand between the yās and the zās on this page. At least I think itās an ampersand. I suppose it could conceivably also be some kind of tall z, but I prefer it as an ampersand and Iām making a mental note of it for future use.
Page 11 is one of my favorite things in this book. A whole page of ligatures organized alphabetically with lots of inventive joins. There are some really fun ones with the fās, hās, and tās. On this page, Materot also starts to reveal how open the spacing of the script is. Even with these conjoined pairings, thereās around a full letterās width worth of open space between characters.
Page 12 wraps up the introductory letterform plates with tons of capitals. Materot has included three general scale groupings with variations for most of the letters of the alphabet within each grouping. I assume the groups are intended as examples for different use cases: title/display text, medium header style text, body text capitals, etcā¦Ā
I think itās worth calling out that there is more variation in the line weight of the capitals at all sizes. Nothing is heavily shaded, but the caps are not as close to monoline as the lowercase letters. My initial thought is that this variable line weight is accomplished through pressure on point cut quills, but a number of letters have weight on both the up and the down portion of a stroke, more like you might find with an edged pen. I think itās most likely that these letters are retouched or done with multiple strokes, as opposed to actually being done with an edged quill. Itās also possible that this weighting is a result of these examples being engraved, but I think itās unlikely that the engraving would deviate this much from the original writing, so retouching with a pointed quill is my guess for the method. It seems super impractical to keep both a pointcut and an edged quill on hand to swap between in the middle of writing. When Iām working in Italian hand, I just use a single flexible pointed nib and a straight holder so that I can easily change up my grip to accomplish certain strokes and shades at different angles.
Following these introductory plates are numerous pages of examples of the script being used in context, and at different sizes. I really appreciate the range here, showing the density of the script and the potential changes in letter variants that will work well at different scales. This contextual writing also makes it clear how fluid the script is. The spacing and rhythm are precise, but thereās a ton of air on the pages and letters flow naturally from one into the next like youād expect for a hand prioritizing speed and legibility.
There are a few more alphabets scattered among the various paragraphs of text. These are nice to have in addition to the initial plates because they show cohesive sets of letters all paired together instead of just the mass of letters with all their variations.
Page 30 is the start of several plates showing other variants of cancellaresca for the period, and is one of my favorites. It features a large, dramatic display style of lettering with heavy black fills on the looped ascenders and descenders. The slant is increased to closer to 57Ā° and the cursive joins between letters are more exaggerated with more fills as well. This may be pushing it too far, but it almost has a bit of a 60ās psychedelic lettering feel to me.
As we get to the end of the book there are a couple of specific pages I think are worth calling out. Page 41 is titled āLettre Italienne formee dāou les autres se deriventeā which Google tells me means āItalian letter form from which the others are derivedā. Page 46 is labeled as an Italian bastarde. The scripts on both of these pages (as well as the similar examples on the surrounding pages) are starting to look an awful lot closer to English roundhand and more modern copperplate-style scripts than Italian hand. The letters are a bit wider than the cancellaresca samples on the earlier plates, andāespecially on page 46āthere are the clear thicks and thins that characterize later roundhands. My knowledge of the history here isnāt sufficient to guess whether Materotās specimens are typical for the period or if heās an early standout in the development of the English roundhand scripts that came to dominate Europe. Either way, itās fun to see the progression beginning.
The book wraps with a few more Italienne bastarde scripts: an āeasy to imitateā option for women, and a few French secretary examples. I actually really love the āeasyā womenās variant. Itās written at around a 70Ā° slant, like the other cancellaresca examples, but the letterforms are a bit broader, and the spacing is a bit tighter. Itās still very lightweight though, so a page of the script still feels very open and airy. It reads as very cursive to me, with shoulder strokes branching from the base of the preceding downstrokes, and connecting strokes starting to have a bit of that zig-zag movement that comes to define Spencerian script much much later. All the blobby bits and dense accented fills have been dropped in favor of simple but elegant looped or curled ascenders and descenders. Little details like the looped stem of the t and the connected entry into the spine of the s make it clear that this is intended to be used as handwriting, with minimal pen lifts and fiddly bits to navigate. Iām definitely adding this to my list of variants to practice and develop for my own uses.
Materotās book has been a favorite of mine for a long time at this point, and itās one I come back to over and over again. His work, along with some of the Dutch scribes and penmen from this period and a little earlier, have had a big influence on how I approach Italian hand. Iāve been putting together thoughts and materials for what Iām hoping to offer as an online course on Italian hand sometime this Spring, so Iāve spent a good portion of my January buried in these pages. I hope you find them as interesting and inspiring as I do.
Next Upā¦
For February, Iām planning on taking a trip down to the Newberry to check out what I believe is one of the earliest known copybooks published by a woman scribeāno itās not Maria Strick! If youāre interested, keep an eye on your email around the end of the month, or follow me on one of the various socials. Iāll probably make a post announcing when that next installment is out. Until then, thanks for studying along with me :)