Antonio Espinosa

TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Fri Sep 11 00:57:17 EDT 2015

FONT RECOGNITION VIA FONT MOOSE




Antonio Espinosa Spanish typefounder, engraver and printer from the 18th century, b. 1732, murcia, d. 1812, Segovia. Unlike Pradell, the craftsman, Antonio Espinosa de los Monteros and Jeronimo Antonio Gil followed academic studies. They specialized in drawing and engraving under Tomas Francisco Prieto, engraver of the Real Casa de la Moneda, from whom they learned the techniques of engraving currencies. Their first task was to complete the matrices of Bernardo Ortiz. Gil and Espinosa began their careers simultaneously but Espinosa veers towards punchcutting. Gil began working for Juan de Santander at the Biblioteca Real until 1778, and was later transferred to the Real Casa de la Moneda de Mexico to become its first engraver, which made Santander lose his best punchcutter. Espinosa, the printer, had his own foundries---one in Madrid, another in Sevilla and one in Segovia, where, in 1777, he founded a drawing school. In his writing and font specimen books he explained his desire to imitate the Spanish calligraphic forms and to engrave directly each punch (without using counterpunches). It is Espinosa's italic that was used in the book La conjuracion de Catalina y la guerra de Jugurta (1772, Ibarra, Madrid). He taught at la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, worked at la Casa de la Moneda de Sevilla (since 1772) and la Casa de la Moneda de Segovia (since 1774), and is famous for creating the Ibarra typeface. Sandra Carrera created an entire typeface system based on the types of Antonio Espinosa de Monteros. Called Pícara (2014) it is a bookish typeface with a knife-cut feel and a sturdy serif. In 1993, Juan Ignacio Pulido Trullén, Sandra Silvia Baldassarri Santa Lucía, and Francisco José Serón Arbeloa (Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain) codesigned the free typeface family Ibarra, which is based on the type used in La conjuracion de Catalina y la guerra de Jugurta (1772, Ibarra, Madrid).	EXTERNAL LINKS Antonio Espinosa MyFonts search Monotype search Google search INTERNAL LINKS The Spanish type scene ⦿ Foundries of the 18th century ⦿