Jean Midolle’s Spécimen des écritures

Midolle’s fantastical alphabets, created between 1830 and 1850, influenced the Romantic era’s calligraphy and typography, and inspired later artists like Marcel Duchamp.

Jean Midolle, originally from Strasbourg, worked in Geneva in the years 1830–1850. Artist, writer, calligrapher, he creates astonishing albums and specimens listing the writings of medieval illuminators, veritable inventories of initials with Merovingian and Carolingian figures. Midolle also offers phantasmagorias like his “forest letters” or his “monster pithy alphabet”, iconic of the romantic era. His alphabets enjoyed great success with letterers and decorators, and were the subject of some interpretations by typefounders: Jules Didot, from 1842, offered a series of fancy letters in this register.

Among Midolle’s publications:

Spécimen des écritures modernes (1834-1835),
Spécimen des écritures anciennes (1835),
Album du moyen-âge (1836),
Traité complet d’écritures en tous genres et d’ornements moyen-âge (1840),
Grand album historique des écritures de tous les âges (1877).

The work of which we present several plates in this article has been published under the complete title of Spécimen des écritures modernes, comprenant les Romaines fleuronnées, Gothiques nouvelles, Fractures, Françaises, Anglaises, Italiennes et Allemandes exécutées à la plume par Jean Midolle gravées sur pierre et publiées à la lithographie de Fe Émile Simon Fils, Strasbourg, 1834–1835. Several examples of lettering it contains, including those of the “monster lapidary alphabet”, were reproduced in an important article in Arts et Métiers Graphiques (Nº44, December 15th, 1934) entitled “The romantic alphabets”, which constituted a rediscovery of this type of creation. It should be noted that Marcel Duchamp appropriated the “monster lapidary alphabet“ , for his cover of Georges Hugnet’s work, La Septième face du dé (1936), but by substituting the names of the elements writers and musicians that Midolle had inscribed in the serifs those of the Surrealist Pantheon: Arnim, Sade, Lautréamont, etc.

Massin subsequently popularized the work of Jean Midolle (La Lettre et l’Image, Paris, Gallimard, 1969; “Jean Midolle and Joseph-Balthazar Silvestre”, in Arts et métiers du livre, January–February 1991). We find these alphabets used in the “Guides noirs”, published by Tchou, in the 1970s, designed by Alain Le Foll and Serge Kristy, alongside the creations of Cieslewicz.