italic

Italic takes its name from Italy — from Medieval Latin italicus, 'of Italy' — because the typeface style was created to imitate the cursive humanist script developed by Italian scholars in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. The humanist scribes of the Italian Renaissance, working in Florence, Rome, and Venice, developed a sloped, slightly compressed, flowing hand based on their misidentification of Carolingian minuscule as ancient Roman script — they believed they were reviving the authentic letterforms of antiquity when they were in fact recovering the elegant hand of 9th-century Frankish scribes. This misidentification produced one of history's most consequential typographic accidents: the humanist hand, derived from the wrong historical model but extraordinarily beautiful in its own right, became the most imitated script in Europe and the basis of the italic typeface.

The first italic typeface was cut by Francesco Griffo for the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius in 1501, and it was used for the Aldine Press's celebrated series of small, portable editions of classical texts. The italic was not invented as an emphasis or variation of roman type — it was conceived as an independent typeface in its own right, intended to reproduce on the printed page the economy and elegance of humanist script. The Aldine italic was sloped and compressed, allowing more characters per line than upright roman type of the same point size, which reduced the number of pages required for a given text and thus the cost of the paper — a significant economic advantage when paper was expensive and readers wanted portable, affordable books. The italic was a money-saving device that happened to be beautiful.

The intellectual property disputes that followed the Aldine italic's success were among the first in typographic history. Aldus Manutius obtained a privilege (a Renaissance precursor of copyright) from the Venetian Republic protecting his italic type design, but the privilege was territorial and limited in duration. Other printers in Italy and then across Europe quickly copied or adapted the Aldine italic; Lyonnaise printers were producing imitation Aldine italics within years of the originals. By the mid-16th century italic had escaped from its status as a proprietary Venetian design and become a generic style available to all printers, no longer associated exclusively with Aldus's elegant classical editions but used across the continent for a wide range of purposes: marginal notes, glosses, letters of dedication, poetry, and gradually the role it occupies today — emphasis within a roman text.

The modern use of italic as an emphasizing device within a roman text is a convention that developed gradually over the 16th and 17th centuries, as roman upright type became the dominant mode for book typography and italic settled into its secondary, marking role. In contemporary typographic practice, italic serves multiple overlapping functions: emphasis, titles of works, technical terms being defined, foreign words or phrases, and certain categories of citation. The same sloped letterforms that Aldus used to pack Virgil into a pocket-sized portable volume now tell readers which word in a sentence carries stress, which phrase comes from another language, which title refers to a book rather than an article. The economics of Renaissance Venice hardened into the conventions of modern reading.