Rhau
CAST · Giulio Galli · 2021
A digital revival of woodcut titling letters from Georg Rhau's 1539 Wittenberg publication, reconstructed into a complete typeface by Giulio Galli.
About
The original four letters — DISCANTUS, ALTUS, TENOR, BASSUS — were drawn from opening pages of the Officia Paschalia, a collection of Lutheran masses printed during the Reformation. Galli extended these peculiar caps, with their spiky serifs and extreme rightward slants, into a full alphabet with lowercase, numerals and punctuation, keeping the rough expressivity of the source material. The result sits somewhere between Renaissance roman and late 19th-century gothic revival, and is suited to display and titling work where texture and historical register matter.
Classification
A digitisation of 16th-century woodcut titling letters from a 1539 Lutheran publication, with spiky serifs, extreme slanted strokes and a rough expressivity that places it firmly in the display category as a Renaissance revival.