Not Veni, Vedi, Vici?

Rather . . . in truth and honesty:
I came, I saw, I did not conquer . . . I just appropriated . . .
and now . . . it’s all mine!

 

If one would tell American designers that few among them are true originators, many of them would shudder and object, even if most of them suffer from Cryptomnesia, which  occurs “when a forgotten memory of the act of having copied someone else’s original work stands in for their plagiarism, and when this memory returns into consciousness it does so without it being recognized by them as such. They believe that it is something new and original, falsely recalling to have generated the concept or the graphic and typographic form and language. They are falsely experiencing as if it were a new inspiration”. Psychiatrists would consider this a malady, but for the design profession this is a historical foundation. Instead of standing on shoulders of very short persons, would it not be more honest, to recognize that all progress, inventions and discoveries come from persons committed to learning, who long before were inventors, and we now are the connection with that history. We also must finally recognize that design is a trade or a craft, begotten by the printing trade and as such a guild always sent out journeymen, the very first openly identifiable industrial spies, to observe and copy, very much like Japanese tourists in the fifties, and report back their discoveries. Now we have design schools and design historians and the true history of the design trade has been a convoluted distortion of reality and has become a personality cult.

For that reason alone, I have always admired Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer. Manutius is considered by me to be an early design academic, worth his weight in gold at any of today’s universities. He did then in the fifteenth century what the digital technologies afford us now. Instead of fighting over the tattered rags of useless anecdotal notoriety, we could, like Manutius did, become a driving force in preserving and supporting the health and wealth of culture, rather than that of business and marketing. Manutius’ gift to all following generations lie in his rediscovery and preservation of ancient texts, which without his efforts would have been lost, maybe forever. Manutius was a driving force behind the rediscovery of ancient literature throughout the Renaissance and this separated him from those who only sharpened their technical craft. He edited, produced the first printed editions of many of the Greek and Latin classics. He published five books of Aristotle. They were pocket-size and relatively inexpensive editions. In his list of authors were Aristophanes, Aesop, Catullus, Erasmus, Euripides, Herodotus, Homer, Juvenal, Lucan, Martial, Petrarca, Pindar, Plato, Sophocles, Theocritus, Thucydides and Virgil, Xenophon, His most famous book was the “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili” of Francesco Colonna, 1499, with what are considered the first book illustrations that are not typographic embellishments, but woodcuts supporting the narrative. Manutius published also the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri.

Today, designers like to surround themselves with successful businessmen and marketers. Not Manutius, he invited significant humanists to the table; teachers, language experts, historians, among them:

Girolamo Aleandro

480 – 1542, who was an early teacher of Greek at the University in Paris and edited texts by Isocrates and Plutarch;

Pietro Bembo

1470 – 1547, not a type designer as one well known design historian presented, but a learned cardinal, who studied Greek under the scholar Constantine Lascaris; later his major efforts were spent reaffirming and promoting classical humanism. He published the “History of Venice”, an addition of Petrarch’s Italian Poems, “Prose della volgar lingua”, also supplements included in editions of Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. Bembo type was designed not by him, but by Francesco Griffo of Bologna, in 1496;

Erasmus of Rotterdam

1466 – 1536, who wrote exclusively in Latin or Greek. He was a prolific writer and authored or translated about 150 books, in addition to more than 2,000 letters, which because of his elegant use of language were known all over Europe as examples of high quality. Erasmus brought about 1,000 words to paper, every day. He saw himself and Manutius, the latter in my eyes is the first graphic designer of consequence, and the Gutenberg printing technology  as a main provider of education: “People are not born as human beings, they evolve as such after they have been educated.” Would that not be a good motto for a design school, making the difference between education and vocational training. He was also a highly regarded textual critic, a publisher, and a grammarian. He founded modern philology. His work is still widely accepted in the scientific reconstruction of Greek phonology;

Johannes Reuchlin

1455 – 1522, was a German-born humanist and a scholar of Greek and Hebrew, and is considered with Erasmus of Rotterdam as the most important European humanists. His translations, editions and personal commentaries promoted the knowledge of the ancient Greek language. Through his time in Germany, he studied the ancient Hebrew language to extraordinary levels, which enabled him to frame the knowledge foundation for the study of  the Old Testament. In the following years his work “De rudimentis hebraicis” which served as a basis, Reuchlin developed into a German representatives of Renaissance Platonism. He discovered the mystical and theological foundation of the Kabbalah and published “De verbo mirifico”, 1494, and “De arte cabalistica”, 1517, two of the most important documents. His book “Augenspiegel” in which he requested not to burn Jewish books, was examined by theologians of Cologne and at the Erfurt University and recommended for censorship. Hermann Serge, the Erfurt theologian, decided to censor Reuchlin’s work, however, he paid tribute to Reuchlin’s erudition and literary skills. Reuchlin’s translations, editions and personal commentaries promoted the knowledge of the ancient Greek language. Through his extraordinary study of ancient Hebrew language he brought the Old Testament to be explored. In the following years his work “De rudimentis hebraicis” served the investigations as a basis.