Giovanni Antonio Tagliente (sometimes written ''Giovannantonio'') (c. 1460s – c. 1528) was a

calligrapher Calligraphy () is a visual art related to writing. It is the design and execution of lettering with a pen, ink brush, or other writing instruments. Contemporary calligraphic practice can be defined as "the art of giving form to signs in an exp ...

, author, printer and

publisher Publishing is the activities of making information, literature, music, software, and other content, physical or digital, available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term publishing refers to the creation and distribu ...

based in

Venice Venice ( ; ; , formerly ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto Regions of Italy, region. It is built on a group of 118 islands that are separated by expanses of open water and by canals; portions of the city are li ...

during the

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) is a Periodization, period of history and a European cultural movement covering the 15th and 16th centuries. It marked the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and was characterized by an effort to revive and sur ...

period. Tagliente began his life as a calligrapher and taught around Italy before returning to Venice in 1491. He worked for the Venetian Chancery and was given a sinecure by the senate, becoming a publisher late in life. Tagliente's publications were textbooks and self-help volumes. These included guides on learning to read, arithmetic, accounting, embroidery patterns, textile production and a book of model love letters. Some of his books were very popular and were issued in dozens of editions. They have come to attention of feminist and social historians for their promotion of reading for women and the uneducated; his textbook on reading aimed to teach reading "in a period of two months, more or less depending on the intelligence of the reader." He also wrote for a target market of potential civil servants. Tagliente published a writing manual, ''The True Art of Excellent Writing'' or ''Lo presente libro'', in Venice in 1524, with engravings and some text set in an italic typeface presumably based on his calligraphy. Tagliente's typeface was an inspiration for historically inclined typeface designers in modern times, becoming the inspiration for the italic of the popular 1928 book typeface

Bembo Bembo is a serif typeface created by the British branch of the Monotype Imaging, Monotype Corporation in 1928–1929 and most commonly used for body text. It is a member of the "Serif#Old-style, old-style" of serif fonts, with its regular or ro ...

. Historian Alfred F. Johnson reprinted his work, along with his contemporary Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi.

References

External links

Lo Presente Libro
(

Google Books Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical charac ...

digitisation)
Page on Tagliente
by

Luc Devroye Luc P. Devroye is a Belgian computer scientist and mathematician and a James McGill Professor in the School of Computer Science of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Devroye wrote around 300 mathematical articles, mostly on probabi ...

16th-century Venetian writers 16th-century Italian male writers Italian typographers and type designers Italian printers Italian publishers (people) Italian scribes Italian non-fiction writers {{authority control