cancellaresca testeggiata
first page of a letter from gianfranceso cresci to cardinal guglielmo sirleto; written by gianfrancesco cresci, dated from milan 6 august 1572 [Vat. Lat. 6185, f. 134]. collotype facsimile in Signature 5 [london, 1948, before p7].
«Cresci belonged to the age of the Baroque, and his script carries its characteristic impress. The tiny point, which initiates a kerned ascender, had by Cresci’s time been magnified to the dimensions of a crowning feature, soon to become standard, well into the seventeenth century, as cancellaresca testeggiata.» [james wardrop, The Script of Humanism [clarendon press, oxford, 1963, p48.]
«…by the middle of the 16th century a shift of style was in progress, involving the use of a thinner more flexible pen to produce a smoother-flowing, elliptically-curved script with club shaped ascenders, the cancellaresca testeggiata, which is, through it adoption by the French calligraphers Materot and Barbedor, the ancestor of the English round hand.» [james mosley, «Trajan Revived», Alphabet 1964, james moran ltd, london, p21.]
