Augustus Mosaic Lettering

#roman #mosaic #lettering #augustus

Adding letters to mosaics tells us something rather disconcerting about levels of literacy amongst craftsmen in the Roman Empire. The designer of this mosaic had excellent layout skills but his letter forms suggest he was not a scribe himself and probably recited letters and got a scribe to write them down for him and his team to copy. 

The letter forms are more like written text preserved on papyri than the forms we see on carved inscriptions and the last 2 letters ... whether thats a delibarate abbreviation or some one running out of the right tesserae color ...

Augustus in Roman Inscriptions

AUGUSTUS IN ROMAN INSCRIPTION

#epigraphy #roman #augustus #typography

Here are two more examples of the word Augustus appearing in Roman Inscriptions.

Note the use of abbreviations. Imp for  Imperator 

Note the crisp sharp lettering!

AUGUST and Inscriptions

#August #inscriptions #roman #typography

The inspiration and model for all those crisp sharp Roman fonts are plaques like this one.

Note the Roman V functioning as a vowel and the balanced space on either side of the T and the descending ratio of letter sizes from Large at top to smaller at the bottom.

The Augustales were a body of priests responsible for offerings to Augustus as a Deity.

The one letter that doesnt quite fit and rises up, the t of et before Iulianus may be an error someone forgetting the t in et but the carver has echoed the style and weight of the T in the top line so it emphasizes the I in Iulianus. 

More Augustan Inscriptions and lettering next time.