Re: VMs: Buonaccorso Ghiberti

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Larry,

At 01:44 07/01/03 -0500, Larry Roux wrote:
> While reading "Brunelleschi's Dome" by Ross King I was struck by the 
> similarity of some of the script contained in drawings by Buonaccorso 
> Ghiberti - a Florentine Artist/Engineer.
>
> It appears that Italian in that era had much the same look, feel and many 
> of the same characters.  Not to mention the preponderance of words short 
> in length (5 letters and less). Well, at least Ghiberti wrote in that 
> fashion...
>
> Has anyone ambled down this lane before?

I enjoyed "Brunelleschi's Dome": and, yes, the resemblance in handwriting 
is from the general 15th Century Italian "humanist hand" - this is one of 
the things that helps place the VMS in an Italian context.

Similarly: I was reading a couple of books on Oddantonio Montefeltro (the 
1st Duke of Urbino) in the British Library yesterday (trying, 
unsuccessfully, to trace the 1440 Urbino cipher ledger), and noticed, in 
some autograph letters of his, that he writes "ch" as a single letter - a 
vertical line crossed through with a single rounded arch, slightly biased 
(in length) towards the right hand side.

In fact, he writes "che" as "ch" with a horizontal superscript struck 
through the vertical line, and I'm sure this is not atypical of a posh 
Italian handwriting of the time.

The ("ch" + gallows) pairs may well have originally derived from this 
"two-stroke ch" character - I'm certainly reminded of them every time I see 
EVA "cph", for example.

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....

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