Western Calligraphy: The Carolingian Alphabet

Video Transcript

"You see how very simple this is? Now I should say okay, that this was done, this is a book hand. Which means it was done in the books, the big important books. And it was done with a much, much smaller, much, much smaller tool than this. Okay, very tiny, very delicate. And this was a period in history, see how rounded, see how much influence the Uncial has here. The f interestingly enough has a little bit of a slant to it, all these other letters are vertical. But the f ended up with a slant. And then the g is in interesting form. Can you get a sense of where the original g comes from? To this and this, this to this? Okay, and just one other thing. Yes, the Carolingian period, the Carolingian painting was elaborate enough and interesting and significant enough, so that there are books about it. This is a book on Carolingian painting, has lots of examples of the Carolingian hand, book hand in there. But you notice in this cover, here's maybe you can see it. This is the use of Roman capitals or what we might call Versals at this point. These little round figures right here, these little round paintings are called Ton Dos. Ton dos. And here they have the four, represented the symbols of the four gospels. So and notice too, this is actually I'm looking at this and I'm seeing that this is the Rustic hand written in a circle around here. And this is all gold, this is all gold. Totally beautiful, totally wonderful and amazing."