Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Day 2


 1. Days Notes

Know how to distinguish between various types of texts.
 Key terms to remember: Lascaux, Sumerian, cuniform, scribe, illuminated manuscript, book of kells.

Some of the earliest of visual communication known are the Paleolithic cave drawings found in the Lascaux caves of France.
The crusades took up a lot of time 1005-1270
Charlemagne ruled the Roman Empire, says one guy is to create a standardized writing system. Caroline Minuscule.   But he also was the head scribe for Charlemagne.
Until the invention of playing cards, our brains worked completely differently before this point.  Becomes entertainment for the rich and poor. (a bit of democracy)
With printed devotionals the poor could own a piece of artifact.
The art of dying
Guttenberg to invent printing, there’s a growing middle class, there’s students in expanding universities. Increased literacy. Monopoly over literacy is being taken away from the church.
Guttenberg is your average Joe who just wants to make a buck. He develops a system to cast letterforms and alloy. He creates the press system, type styles, ligatures. Prior to the printing thing he was a jeweler or goldsmith.

Short film: the making of a renaissance book

Typography, printing with type became a important advance in history.
Guttenberg bible is printed between 1400-1455
Gets sued and loses and someone else takes over the business.
Incunabula- refers to the first 50 years of printing ( the Guttenberg bible is the first )
Guttenberg goes on to open his own press but with a lesser quality.
Printings center was in meinz Germany, 1500 35 editions of 9 million books
Typographic printing major communication advances the invention of writing and 20th century.
Guttenberg based his type on the book of the dead.
Exemplar page: example page like a storyboard

In 1465 two printers from meinz brought Italy
They were exploring classical text. Assumed that it was original text
1475 the first oriented English book. Caldarium
1639 Steven Daye’s brought printing to the colonies
1700’s Rococo period (early baroque): ornate, girly, French wigs, people that you would beat up in bar.
 1702 Philippe Grandjean, specimen of romaine du roi
Typeface stayed the same until the French revolution.

2. Personal Thoughts:

It's amazing to see the progress of text through the years. The complexity that it was to create a letter form for a press really made me cringe at the thought of sitting there for hours. I got excited when we started to get into the Rococo period, it happens to be something i remember the most from past art history classes. Just the complexity of each ornate object made me wonder more and more about the style until it died because most people thought it was a hideous movement.

3. Questions/ Research

Im curious to see how the english text expanded after it was brought to the colonies. But also what happened in Europe after that as well?

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