By Louisa Mattozzi with additional photography by Emma Ihara and Madi Rohm
Urbino, Italy – Since 1912, visitors from around the world have made the journey to walk the halls of the National Gallery of Le Marche in the Ducale Palace of this historic Renaissance city.
But the collection’s most significant piece of art has remained largely overlooked—the palace itself.
That ended when Luca Molinari began his exhibit on the palace’s architecture, “The Ducal Palace. The Fragments and the Whole.” This exhibit explores the unique aspects of the palace—and it’s located so that visitors must pass through it before seeing the rest of the museum.
“The idea is to have an exhibition as a lens to help you get closer to the details of the palace,” explained Jonathan Pierini, one of the exhibit coordinators.
The Ducale Palace, commissioned by the Duke of Montefeltro in the mid 15th century, is one of Italy’s best examples of Renaissance architecture. With its tan symmetrical twin turrets and stacked arched balconies, it towers over the historic center of Urbino. Today it houses works by some of the most famous Renaissance artists, including Titian, Piero Della Francesca, and Raphael.
The National Gallery of Le Marche invited the local design university, The Higher Institute for Artistic Industries in Urbino (ISIA U), to create an exhibit on the palace’s architecture. The exhibit contains photography of the building, drawings inspired by the architecture, and typography based on the famous palace inscriptions. Now when visitors walk through the palace to reach the Renaissance galleries, they move through the exhibit first, learning about the building itself.
The exhibit, partially inspired by a workshop co-coordinators of the exhibit Radim Pesko and Jonathan Pierini ran last year, contains analyses of several aspects of the Ducale Palace. One of the most visually stunning sections interprets the famous inscription encircling the palace courtyard as modern fonts. It reads:
“Federico, Duke of Urbino, Count of Montefeltro and Casteldurante, Knight of the Holy Roman Catholic Church and Commander of the Italic Confederation, Head of his House built this for his glory and laid its foundations for posterity. He fought in many wars; six times he united the ranks; eight times he put the enemy to flight; he won every battle and increased his territory. His justice, clemency, liberalism, devotion, and peace are equally honored with his victories.”
ISIA U students competed to be on one of the research teams to design three new fonts, based on the original inscription. The exhibition displays printed-out examples of the final fonts, designed to be used in at least 20 languages.
“We wanted to try and produce the inscription using contemporary technologies…. To see if that still makes sense,” said Pierini.
There are two significant challenges in transforming the inscription into a modern typeface.
First, the inscriptions are in Latin, which does not include all the letters in modern alphabets. For example, J, K, U, W, and Z—common letters in modern English—are not present in the inscription.
Second, Renaissance artists did not see value in letter consistency, so they carved each letter in the courtyard slightly differently. Pierini said the original carvers wanted to have variation. “We think archetypal letter forms are consistent throughout culture and through the centuries, but they are not. It’s just a construction we make of the past.”
The students produced three digital typefaces, each solving the problems differently. Perhaps the most streamlined is Martina Negroni and Gabriele Serrau’s creation, a typeface named Cortegiano after the famous book The Book of the Courtier, written by Baldassare Castiglione at the Court of Urbino in the 16th century.
They describe their approach as “trying to see the overall picture.”
“Which meant to study…the history behind it and what the mindset or ideas in the Renaissance were that influenced the carving of those letters,” said Serrau.
He also cited Renaissance men who theorized about letters, such as Felice Feliciano and Luca Pacioli.
“They took perfect geometric shapes like squares and used them as a base for building letters,” he explained.
To replicate the interest in perfect geometry at the time, they decided to use a system based on a Renaissance grid (outlines inside of which the designer creates the letter), “so it was coming from history, not from our understanding of the letters.” says Negroni.
Using a grid made developing new letters for the typeface easier.
“We tried to remember the tradition of engraving and these kinds of grids,” said Negroni. “We tried to understand how we could apply grids to missing letters or letters with many variations. We were trying to rationalize the letters.”
After sketching the letters using the Renaissance grid, Serrau and Negroni set aside the grid system “to optically correct anything that could be mathematically correct but unpleasant to look at,” said Negroni. “It’s not always true that what is correct on the theoretical side is also pleasant to see.”
“We were very aware of our translation into a digital typeface. So, it was essential to say this is not a copy. This type is something that we derived from an inscription. It maintains some features. It expands some others, and for this reason, at a certain point, we left behind the grid and worked more with our eyes and our understanding of what a digital typeface is.”
The frustrations of working with the inscription come from the difference between the use of the original typeface and the new type. The original designers only meant for the inscription to be single-use—a single line of text wrapping around a courtyard. But the varied uses of a modern-day digital typeface mean the letters must work in any layout.
“You need something that works for paragraphs, not just beautiful letters,” said Serrau.
Serrau noted, “The typeface can communicate something more than its technical features.” “Typography design, in general, is something that looks very static. It feels like it’s just letters that everyone can read, so it feels like they’re always the same but, in their shape, in their proportions, in the details, you can find a lot of information that can tell you about the philosophy, the ideas of the people who drew those letters.”
The exhibit runs in the National Gallery of Le Marche from April 27th to November 5th.