Monika Marek-Łucka In the context of the Western writing tradition, fluidity might be associated either with informal cursive everyday writing or with official formal hands. In the first case, fluidity would mean the urge to record something as quickly as possible, with less concern for its appearance. In the latter case, the meaning of fluidity shifts from pragmatic to aesthetic and, as such, becomes synonymous with an artistic approach to creating letter shapes.
For the Western writing tradition, discovering fluidity—as the freeing and extending of the inner energy of letters—marked a threshold that transformed writing into the art of writing, namely calligraphy. But changes in the history of humankind do not happen suddenly. Driven by curiosity about how exactly this transition to calligraphy unfolded in the Western writing tradition, I conducted research focused on writing manuals from 1500–1800.
This is how I discovered that before “calligraphy” meant “beautiful writing,” it referred to beautiful quotes from Ancient authors to be used by orators or to learning the Greek alphabet. The semantic drift of the term “calligraphy” is truly fascinating. I also found that, up until the 18th century, the art of writing was defined by highly pragmatic categories such as “exercises,” “practice,” or “methodology.” It is hard to associate these dry expressions with the astonishingly complex and flourishing calligraphy compositions of writing masters such as Tagliente, Palatino, Arrighi, or even Mercator, who described their work in these terms.
I further discovered that the meaning of the Latin word “ars” or the German word “Kunst” in the context of writing manual titles had more in common with the Greek “techné”, as a knowledge based on a set of rules, than with the concept of art as we understand it from the Enlightenment onward. The presentation is based on my doctoral research.