Instead of having a monumental triumphal arch built, he got Dürer to print a monumental poster of a triumphal arch, and had copies of it stuck up in all the public places.
Considering how much more expensive woodcutting and printing were in the early 1500s… couldn’t he have just built an actual tirumphal arch (albeit simplified) with that money?
Part of the point was to hand out copies to wealthy allies as a visible sign of favor. Physical arches are a little bit harder to dole out that way, or distribute around the nation. It was also cutting edge technology in a way simple arches weren't.
> the origins of Fraktur, that typeface having been commissioned by Maximilian I
It’s interesting to learn that Fraktur itself only dates back to the 16th century — the broader blackletter family of scripts goes back 400 years earlier than that, and was once used across the whole of western Europe.
BTW, Oliver Heaviside campaigned against Fraktur "German letters must go!" and I have to admit the do not look really good in math formulas, at least to my taste. He even claimed Germans would get short sighted by reading Fraktur (I didn't find the quote on the internet, so I have to look that up in my library if anyone is interested)
> Oliver Heaviside [...] even claimed Germans would get short sighted by reading Fraktur
Well Heaviside was a bit of a kook, especially in his later years, and that claim seems entirely in character :) My contacts with Fraktur are intermittent and brief, so I don't really have an opinion; I mostly encounter it in an old German-English dictionary which I occasionally consult, where the German text is printed in Fraktur. I don't have too many problems reading it.
Interestingly, the eye complaint was a recurring one about various novel typefaces, esp. see Benjamin Franklin's autobiography where he substitutes text set in Caslon (the old approved standard) for Baskerville (the upstart the person he was with didn't like).
As a person with an eye not especially trained for typography, these two typefaces appear too remarkably similar to be quarreled over. I’m sure those with stronger type setting preferences would disagree, but I find it funny how much humans can debate over things that appear minute and mundane to others (cf. https://xkcd.com/915/)
The thing is, the subtle distinctions do seem to matter in terms of reader acceptance and comprehension, at least in my experience of setting type.
Like most things, it's a gradient/continuum, and achieving true excellence is the result of iterating and testing until all decisions/selections are correct.
I wonder how much that's due to reverse polarization causing modern far right to copy Nazis from Hollywood or videogame depictions of Nazis, which tended to use Fraktur as a signifier.
Same fun when they couldn't decide if they were for or against Sütterlin scripture.
They also like to drive Simson motorcycles.
Despite the Simson family being Jewish (and publicly calling out against the AfD).
They dress with "Fred Perry" -- look it up yourself, how paradox that is.
The right-wing likes to talk about the German heritage of the "Dichtern and Denker" (poets and thinkers) and yet the Third Reich was stupid enough to kill or at least exile most.
They like to talk about /clean blood/, /natural order/ despite biology having a different opinion which it clearly shows when inbreeding happens (also due to xenophobia).
Their /family values/ are indistinguishable from the islamists they pretend to fight.
...
The list of paradoxes never ends.
...
I’m in the process of learning Sütterlin / Kurrent for genealogical purposes. While Fraktur is easy to learn, Kurrent is just horrible, even though the textbook I used, written in 1995, still declares it a superior handwriting cruelly banned by the Nazis.
If you read the article, it's ideologically consistent - the main motivation in abandoning Fraktur was strategic (i.e. military), not ideological. I'm pretty sure the "actually Fraktur is Jewish" argument wouldn't even have come up if Hitler and Goebbels hadn't already pushed for adopting Latin script. The Nazis weren't exactly pragmatists but they were always opportunists.
Also the modern far-right in Germany has an undercurrent of monarchists, we've just lost the political language to label them as such - much like how we unironically refer to conservatives as "centrists" because referring to anyone but a nazi as "right-wing" is often implied to have certain undertones, although the conservative party that helped pass the Enabling Act was literally called the Christian Center Party.
And although the Nazis weren't exactly ideologically coherent - fascists generally aren't - the driving ideology in the modern German far-right (including within the AfD) is actually völkisch nationalism which the Nazis were at least making heavy use of in their propaganda.
I'd even argue remnants of völkisch nationalism even made it into the German constitution: it uses the term Volk and Volkszugehöriger (in Art. 116 Abs. 1 GG) without defining either of them. The definition of Volk instead had to be provided by a constitutional court ruling - German citizens plus Volkszugehörige - and that second term is defined in a seperate law (§ 6 BVFG) which uses a very narrow and arbitrary definition that's clearly a condensed bureaucratic remnant of a much broader ideological pre-existing definition (arguably the consequence of having to deal with a similar problem as laws trying to combat racism that want to avoid validating "race science" by pinning down exact definitions for each relevant category)[0].
Also in German popular culture the colloquial definition of "Deutsch" seems to be very much colored by völkisch ideas: someone who is "ethnically distinct" (e.g. skin color, eye shape) is generally regarded as a "migrant"/"foreigner" even if they are German citizens, speak fluent German, are culturally German and have multiple generations of direct ancestors who lived in Germany.
[0] Source: Bundestag white paper "Zu den Begriffen „deutsches Volk“, „Deutsche“ und deutsche Volkszugehörigkeit“ im Grundgesetz":
It makes me laugh every time that the Nazis' Glorious Germanic Heritage of the Aryan Masterrace Ancestors Fraktur script turned out to have been created by Jewish printers and they went "Nevermind, forget it" then choose Antiqua, which, to be frank, is not the most adapted typeface for small printed folio books and papers of the time (and still isn't today).
I didin't know that Hitler personnally disliked Fraktur, must have helped.
Fraktur needs some eye adaptation to read it fluently because we are not used to some ligatures anymore and the typographic conventions can be different in the late 18th / early 19th century (for instance the Grimm brothers advocated against the captitalization of German common names), but I find it quite legible.
Remember December 2025, when Marco Rubio ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor's decision to adopt Calibri a “wasteful” diversity move ?
In a choice of either Times New Roman or Calibri, I would think that Times fits the US State Dept better. Calibri is a relaxed, modern typeface, while Times is classical and majestic. (The word "stately" also comes to mind.)
It would probably be better if State Department would get their own typeface -- as opposed to picking one from MS Office defaults -- but even then, I'd argue for Antiqua style (serif). SCOTUS, for one, is using Century Schoolbook.
P.S. I don't care at all about Rubio, Dem-Rep divide, "diversity" vs "wastefulness" debate, or any of the arguments brought from either side in 2023 (when they changed Times to Calibri) or 2025 (when they switched back).
The use of Century Schoolbook by the Supreme Court is more a matter of their accepting the default selection of the Government Printing Office (GPO) --- before they switched to using Adobe InDesign, their updated design manual was available as a PDF typeset by "ACOMP.exe" (anyone know anything about it? Apparently it was a custom typesetting tool which made PDFs from XML?) which was visually indistinguishable from an earlier edition style guide I had printed during WWII (with a note about paper shortages in it).
But to take an extreme example: at least at first glance, how would treat a SCOTUS decision written in Times New Roman versus one written in Comic Sans?
It's hard to explain, but serif typefaces have centuries of history behind them, with practically all the books (in Europe and America) using some variant of serif since basically the invention of movable type. You can add most of newspapers to this list (notably "Times" part comes from a font being cast for the British newspaper The Times in 1930s.) The Roman Empire is a source of these (just look at the inscription on the Pantheon[0]), so that's for the "Roman" part. Using serif fonts signifies "tradition". Using sans-serif signifies "modernity". Being "stately" is more about the former than the latter.
Interestingly, the building that houses the State Dept[1] has its style defined as "Modern Movement" and "Stripped classical", which is interesting, because it's somewhere in the middle between modern and classical, while not being quite any of them. To me, it looks mostly bland; I'd much rather have an office in Congress building, or Supreme Court building, or the White House, all of which are strictly classical.
Serif fonts in general are more formal (or "stately"). That's because of the, well, serifs. Sans-serifs visually resemble/evoke handwriting because in handwriting we don't make serifs. Try writing with serifs for everyday stuff and it will quickly reveal to be visually and logistically annoying.
The only question is which brand of formal do you want to evoke. TNR feels very straightforward and no-nonsense to me. So I wouldn't really object to associating it with bureaucratic memos and documents. For something more leisurely I'd go with either Garamond or Georgia. Georgia is my favorite but it's a bit too fancy for long texts. It's better suited for quotes.
As an aside, I hate that Introduction to Algorithms [CORMEN] uses a TNR-like font. It makes it look like a Physics textbook. They could've stayed with default Computer Modern and strengthened my Pavlovian conditioning to it. Whenever I read something in Computer Modern, my heart palpitates a little in the way it did when I sat through my Data Structures exams.
Georgia is nice, but rather recent. Garamond, Baskerville, Bodoni, Caslon, Century are all centuries old. If we're talking about the US State department, it would probably be fitting to look at the fonts that were used for US printing and communication (and are still used.)
> Rubio’s memo makes the argument — correctly — that aesthetics matter, and that the argument that Calibri was in any way more accessible than Times New Roman was bogus. Rubio’s memo does not lash out against accessibility as a concern or goal. He simply makes the argument that Blinken’s order mandating Calibri in the name of accessibility was an empty gesture. Purely performative, at the cost of aesthetics.
[…]
> 2024 was a Biden year, not a Trump year, so there’s no reason to think the remediation numbers were counted differently. The change to Calibri was the worst kind of accessibility effort: one that was founded on nothing more than feel-good performance. It was a change everyone could see and notice, but one that had no practical benefit whatsoever. Good on Rubio for rescinding a bad decision, and even better for doing so with a fair and informative explanation.^2
Gruber is no fan of the Trump administrator generally, but he thinks in this case it seems that they/Rubio got it right.
He also recently had a post on the various style guides of various US federal courts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumphal_Arch_(woodcut)
Instead of having a monumental triumphal arch built, he got Dürer to print a monumental poster of a triumphal arch, and had copies of it stuck up in all the public places.
This on the other hand, you could put up all over the place.
It’s interesting to learn that Fraktur itself only dates back to the 16th century — the broader blackletter family of scripts goes back 400 years earlier than that, and was once used across the whole of western Europe.
Well Heaviside was a bit of a kook, especially in his later years, and that claim seems entirely in character :) My contacts with Fraktur are intermittent and brief, so I don't really have an opinion; I mostly encounter it in an old German-English dictionary which I occasionally consult, where the German text is printed in Fraktur. I don't have too many problems reading it.
Like most things, it's a gradient/continuum, and achieving true excellence is the result of iterating and testing until all decisions/selections are correct.
Of course, these wannabe guys use the proper fraktur. They usually use the wrong s and don't care about proper ligatures.
And many of them use Fraktur wrongly (in particular: wrong usage of long vs round s; not using compulsory ligatures).
not /s
"The rejection of modernism"
You cannot argue with stupids
Also the modern far-right in Germany has an undercurrent of monarchists, we've just lost the political language to label them as such - much like how we unironically refer to conservatives as "centrists" because referring to anyone but a nazi as "right-wing" is often implied to have certain undertones, although the conservative party that helped pass the Enabling Act was literally called the Christian Center Party.
And although the Nazis weren't exactly ideologically coherent - fascists generally aren't - the driving ideology in the modern German far-right (including within the AfD) is actually völkisch nationalism which the Nazis were at least making heavy use of in their propaganda.
I'd even argue remnants of völkisch nationalism even made it into the German constitution: it uses the term Volk and Volkszugehöriger (in Art. 116 Abs. 1 GG) without defining either of them. The definition of Volk instead had to be provided by a constitutional court ruling - German citizens plus Volkszugehörige - and that second term is defined in a seperate law (§ 6 BVFG) which uses a very narrow and arbitrary definition that's clearly a condensed bureaucratic remnant of a much broader ideological pre-existing definition (arguably the consequence of having to deal with a similar problem as laws trying to combat racism that want to avoid validating "race science" by pinning down exact definitions for each relevant category)[0].
Also in German popular culture the colloquial definition of "Deutsch" seems to be very much colored by völkisch ideas: someone who is "ethnically distinct" (e.g. skin color, eye shape) is generally regarded as a "migrant"/"foreigner" even if they are German citizens, speak fluent German, are culturally German and have multiple generations of direct ancestors who lived in Germany.
[0] Source: Bundestag white paper "Zu den Begriffen „deutsches Volk“, „Deutsche“ und deutsche Volkszugehörigkeit“ im Grundgesetz":
https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/643190/7855da277bbd33...
References:
Art. 116 GG: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_116.html
§ 6 BVFG: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bvfg/__6.html
I didin't know that Hitler personnally disliked Fraktur, must have helped.
Fraktur needs some eye adaptation to read it fluently because we are not used to some ligatures anymore and the typographic conventions can be different in the late 18th / early 19th century (for instance the Grimm brothers advocated against the captitalization of German common names), but I find it quite legible.
It would probably be better if State Department would get their own typeface -- as opposed to picking one from MS Office defaults -- but even then, I'd argue for Antiqua style (serif). SCOTUS, for one, is using Century Schoolbook.
P.S. I don't care at all about Rubio, Dem-Rep divide, "diversity" vs "wastefulness" debate, or any of the arguments brought from either side in 2023 (when they changed Times to Calibri) or 2025 (when they switched back).
See:
https://www.govinfo.gov/collection/gpo-style-manual
and contrast 2000 to 1984 and earlier.
See perhaps this article on the various style guides of various US federal courts:
* https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/the_fonts_of_the_us_feder...
Or various other articles:
* "On Fonts: Why Lawyers Should Switch To Century Schoolbook": https://www.ncbarblog.com/on-fonts-why-lawyers-should-switch...
* "Typography for Lawyers": https://typographyforlawyers.com
But to take an extreme example: at least at first glance, how would treat a SCOTUS decision written in Times New Roman versus one written in Comic Sans?
Interestingly, the building that houses the State Dept[1] has its style defined as "Modern Movement" and "Stripped classical", which is interesting, because it's somewhere in the middle between modern and classical, while not being quite any of them. To me, it looks mostly bland; I'd much rather have an office in Congress building, or Supreme Court building, or the White House, all of which are strictly classical.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_S_Truman_Building
I can’t help but strongly disagree with that. To me, "stately" would mean something more pragmatic and efficient.
The only question is which brand of formal do you want to evoke. TNR feels very straightforward and no-nonsense to me. So I wouldn't really object to associating it with bureaucratic memos and documents. For something more leisurely I'd go with either Garamond or Georgia. Georgia is my favorite but it's a bit too fancy for long texts. It's better suited for quotes.
As an aside, I hate that Introduction to Algorithms [CORMEN] uses a TNR-like font. It makes it look like a Physics textbook. They could've stayed with default Computer Modern and strengthened my Pavlovian conditioning to it. Whenever I read something in Computer Modern, my heart palpitates a little in the way it did when I sat through my Data Structures exams.
* https://daringfireball.net/misc/2025/12/state-department-ret...
* Via: https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/full_text_of_marco_rubio_...
Gruber's commentary:
> Rubio’s memo makes the argument — correctly — that aesthetics matter, and that the argument that Calibri was in any way more accessible than Times New Roman was bogus. Rubio’s memo does not lash out against accessibility as a concern or goal. He simply makes the argument that Blinken’s order mandating Calibri in the name of accessibility was an empty gesture. Purely performative, at the cost of aesthetics.
[…]
> 2024 was a Biden year, not a Trump year, so there’s no reason to think the remediation numbers were counted differently. The change to Calibri was the worst kind of accessibility effort: one that was founded on nothing more than feel-good performance. It was a change everyone could see and notice, but one that had no practical benefit whatsoever. Good on Rubio for rescinding a bad decision, and even better for doing so with a fair and informative explanation.^2
Gruber is no fan of the Trump administrator generally, but he thinks in this case it seems that they/Rubio got it right.
He also recently had a post on the various style guides of various US federal courts:
* https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/the_fonts_of_the_us_feder...