Calligraphy is the art of writing script in such a way that the letters themselves express the beauty of what is being written.
Calligraphy can be traced back to the first recorded forms of expression: our ancestors’ cave paintings from 25,000 to 30,000 years ago. With the development of Egyptian hieroglyphics around 3500 B.C., this form of pictorial communication became stylized. Around 1000 B.C., the Phoenicians developed one of the first alphabets, which was an entirely different writing system in which each symbol represented a sound rather than an idea or a picture. Many peoples, including the Greeks, adopted and modified the Phoenician alphabet. The Greek alphabet was adopted the Romans and adapted to suit Latin.
Latin marks the beginnings of what many consider to be modern calligraphy. It was the language of the Middle Ages’ all-powerful churches, when monks were among society’s only literate members. One of their responsibilities was to commit the word of God to paper scribbling ancient texts into ornate volumes for holy elite and royalty to read. The monks gave the script a flourishing style to make the letters more glorious, as if to make the inscriptions worthy of the holy words they were conveying. To save money on paper, the style was also kept to a minimum. It was the first form of European calligraphy as we know it today, and it became known as Gothic.
By the mid-fifteenth century, the printing press had made Gothic print Bibles available, obviating the need for monks’ calligraphy skills. For personal correspondence, formal business, and social invitations, beautiful penmanship became fashionable among educated society. The art of calligraphy flourished alongside the Renaissance, and Italians contributed their own script, italic. Then, as with the printing press before it, engraved copperplates imitated the new italic script, and calligraphy’s popularity waned once more.
The flat-edged pen that we associate with calligraphy had been replaced round-tipped pens the nineteenth century, making it difficult to produce the artistic lines required for calligraphy. The lost art of beautiful penmanship was all but forgotten until British artist and poet William Morris (1834-1896) took an interest in it. He reintroduced the flat-edge pen toward the end of his life, restoring the art of calligraphy to its former glory.
Despite the fact that computers can now accurately replicate any script, calligraphy is still alive and well today. Calligraphy guilds can be found in the United States, Canada, Italy, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Spain, among other places.