Rotunda Veneta
CAST · Riccardo Olocco · 2020
A scholarly revival of Nicolas Jenson's 1474 rotunda type, designed by Riccardo Olocco for both text and display use.
About
Based on the larger of Jenson's two rotunda sizes — his 106G type used in the 1475 Decretales — the design extends the original's incomplete Latin alphabet by sourcing missing letterforms from Erhard Ratdolt's Jensonian types and Ratdolt's early Venetian numerals. OpenType historical forms include long-s ligatures (sb, sl, ss, st), a contextual round r, and a Tironian r in place of the ampersand. Unusually, the face requires no kerning pairs, a property Olocco attributes to the calligraphic origins of gothic capitals.
Classification
Rotunda Veneta is a digitisation of a 15th-century Southern Textualis type, specifically a rotunda — the formal book hand of southern Europe — as cut by Nicolas Jenson in 1474. Rotunda is a distinct branch of the blackletter family, characterised by rounder, less angular forms than Textura.