After a flurry of useful activity during the pontificates of Gregory and Sixtus, they had fallen into disuse. A hundred and fifty years later, these were the punches (“an immense typographic arsenal”45) that Ruggieri handed over to Bodoni. What a rush of nostalgia for Bodoni as he handled the dirty, rusty objects and recalled his childhood self on the gallery of his home in Saluzzo, playing with his grandfather’s collection of old punches. He started to play again, to clean, to repair, to sort this printers’ tower of Babel, and to place the letters safely in their proper cases. In the course of this work, fondling and ultimately revivifying neglected objects, Bodoni found his true love.
It was time to design a face and to cut punches himself. Lacking experience with steel (until then he had only cut wood letters and decorations), he enlisted the help of a friend, a German engraver of medals, one Bernardo Bergher. It was a poor choice. Though an expert with medals, Bergher was a dunce with punches. He rushed the job, and the punches ended up shoddily cut and poorly justified. To make things worse, after the proofs were taken, sad affairs that they were, Bodoni examined the pieces of type and found they had completely broken down, either from poor casting or poor metal, or a combination of both. He learned from the experience, and it sharpened his determination to shift for himself. He picked up graver and file, and working entirely on his own, cut a decoration, cast it, and printed it — and it was beautiful. Heady with success, he started to cut and cast more letters, some simple, some elaborate, some exquisitely small. He was critical of his first small typeface, which he cut in the style of Garamond, but it was much admired and praised all over Rome.46 He became a magician with his tools, and soon acquired a reputation for skill and perfectionism. He joined the ranks of the punchcutters at the press, and was rewarded for his efforts, as the following record of payment attests: “To Gio. Battista Bodoni . . . in payment for various decorations, tailpieces, and miniature alphabets and other services to the said printing office, the sum of 10 scudi.”47
Cardinal Spinelli decided to broaden Bodoni’s skills by sending him to university for the study of exotic languages. The University of Rome, “La Sapienza” [wisdom], was then located in the Palazzo della Sapienza. Set squarely, or rather, rectangularly, between the Pantheon and the Piazza Navona, it was founded in 1303 by Pope Boniface VII, making it almost as old as the Sorbonne.48 It offered a range of disciplines in addition to its prime subjects, theology and religious history. Law, literature, medicine, and foreign languages flourished, but the hard sciences, although taught, were regarded with suspicion, while natural sciences were largely ignored. Astronomy was anathema.
Bodoni duly reported to the university and plunged into the study of Arabic and Hebrew.49 Focusing closely on how the scripts were constructed, he quickly gained a visual knowledge of the languages, and this knowledge became the foundation for his lifelong obsession with foreign type.
Bodoni was not only absorbed in the study of languages, he was also influenced by his surroundings at La Sapienza. Each day as he entered the quadrangle, he came face to face with the astonishing university chapel of Saint Ivo. Just as Borromini’s Rei Magi chapel at the Propaganda Fide loomed large in Bodoni’s personal geography of Rome, so now did Saint Ivo, also designed by Borromini, and completed in 1660. The building is pure geometry: its footprint is a circle and two superimposed equilateral triangles, making up a Star of David. On the other hand, it is a novel masterpiece of the High Baroque, full of striking originality and organic movement, provided in large part by Borromini’s signature convex and concave undulations, and the lighthearted riff on Trajan’s column that his spire displays.
Saint Ivo’s is a bride of a church, white, white, white — a place in which to sit and to dream of paper (if you were Bodoni), as in the pure white of the interior; and of ink, as in the sharp black and white of the floor tiles; and of letters, as in the complex geometry of the structure. But it seems as though something of the coils and countercoils of the High Baroque began to disturb Bodoni. Although his own wood engravings were full of the fashionable twirls and curlicues of the period, he was continually drawn to what he saw in purely classical buildings and monuments, but more importantly, to the inscriptions on them.
In the elegant surroundings of Borromini’s High Baroque church and library, Bodoni began to change. The young man from Piedmont was on his way to becoming very classical in his tastes and intentions, very elegant, and very, very grand.
WHEN CARDINAL SPINELLI and Abbé Ruggieri saw how adept Bodoni was at working with exotic alphabets, they decided he should replace the current aged and incompetent compositor of foreign languages. One of the first volumes they assigned to him was Bishop Raffaele Tuki’s Pontificale copto-arabo (a pontifical contains the rites performed by bishops). For this work, he was greatly assisted by Father Giorgi, his Arabic teacher at La Sapienza. Bodoni was required not only to design the book but to provide a title page and various decorations throughout. For the title page, he cut the letters and decorations in wood, but for the text he used metal letters in Coptic and Arabic which were already on hand at the Propaganda Fide.50 He placed the languages in two columns, and printed the book in two colors, black and red. Ruggieri, on seeing the first printing, insisted that Bodoni place his name and city on the title page of subsequent printings. This was an astonishing accolade for a lowly apprentice and salient evidence of Ruggieri’s appreciation of the young man’s work (Plates 20 & 21).
Saint Ivo. Interior of dome.
Beautiful though Bodoni’s bold and colorful title page is, the head- and tailpieces are disconcerting. They have absolutely nothing to do with pontifical rites in the Arabo/Coptic church and everything to do with High Baroque excess. In one, two lions with human heads flank the torso of a hermaphroditic Flora spewing forth from a sunflower, head laden with a basket of fruit. But look closely, and you’ll find a neat Roman B, set in the middle of a triangle below the torso, at what would be knee level if Flora’s lower half were not subsumed in a sunflower stalk. With this Roman B, set in a stylistically discordant engraving within a particularly complex and serious religious work, Bodoni revealed his presence. The letter looks superimposed on the engraving, tacked on in a moment of self-congratulation.
Tail-piece with “B” in Pontificale arabo-copto.
The only rationale possible for this jeu d’esprit (and the excuse is a real stretch) is that the B might reflect the squareness of the Coptic characters, while the Baroque flourishes of the decoration reflect the undulations of Arabic script. Perhaps Bodoni was in a flurry of typesetting when Ruggieri asked him to include some decorations, so he sought out something he had already in hand. Finding a decoration the right size for his purpose, he inserted Flora (a tiny touch of carnality) and his Roman B (Look at me! Look at me!) into the august surroundings of the Pontificale copto-arabo.
BODONI WORKED concurrently on another book, the Alphabetum Tibetanum, by the aforementioned Father Antonio Agostino Giorgi (1711-1797). A good friend to Ruggieri, Giorgi was director of the Biblioteca Angelica, procurator general of the Augustinians, and a seasoned warrior against any threat that challenged the precepts of his order, especially Protestantism.51 A professor of exotic languages,