Le Antichità della Città di Roma
In this post an analysis of the typography and illustrations of the book “Le Antichità della Città di Roma” can be found.
Starting with the typography, the main text is aligned in full justification. The font size as well as the margins are small. The chapter headings on the other hand are clearly distinguishable from the text through a bigger font and are written in capital letters. All chapters start with an initial. At the top of each page, the chapter gets mentioned again – also written in capital letters. Furthermore, it is striking that at the bottom of every page, on a seperate line, the first word of the next page is printed. Overall the book is outlined in a compact way and it looks, at least in regard to font size and margins, similar to a modern Reklam booklet.
Moving on to the illustrations, the written text gets supported with various illustrations, manly perspective views. They are scattered throughout the text in order to illustrate and support the issues discussed in the text. Regarding their size, they mostly cover about a third of a page. The illustrations are labeled in capital letters. However, they are not numbered, as they always occur within the respective paragraph of text. All illustrations were printed from wood cuts, taken from the drawings of Giovanni Antonio Dosi, who was – similarly to the author Bernardo Gamucci – from San Gimignano.
Considering that the greater part of the book is composed of text and also taking into account that the images themselves are sized rather small, it can be suggested, that the text has a more important role than the illustrations. As it was also stated in the book itself, it was a guide book to the ancient buildings of Rome.
A digitalized and translated excerpt of the book can be accessed through the download link below.