Monday, February 16

In class today, we discussed printing during the Reniassance, Albrecht Durer and Martin Luther. Albrecht was the man responsible for bringing the Reniassance to Germany. He had traveled to Venice and felt that their craftsmanship was better, so he wrote a book for the Germans about how to design on a grid. Martin Luther split from the Catholic church and pointed out their faults, inspiring some graphics of Christ and the Pope and the different Christian religions, such as Lutheranism. The start of our discussion of the Reniassance today was on the "reniassance man", who is good at everything he does. We highlighted Tory, Manutius, and Ratdolt and discussed what made them "reniassance men". Tory seemed to have his hand in almost everything and started the use of things like apostrophes in his text, while Manutius was basically the man with the money that funded a lot of what he got credit for and Ratdolt was most famous for having a complete title page and the woodblock border. I feel that this discussion of each man and his works was helpful because I had difficulty reading about them and got confused. Why didn't Griffo get more of the credit for his works in developing italics, among other things, instead of Manutius?