From Letters of the Temporary State, here’s an article entirely dedicated to… italics. An easily digestible historical essay, from the script to the slanted.

To start with, when should you really use italics anyway?

The Chicago Manual of Style (whose cover is set entirely in italic) prescribes the use of italic for emphasis, book and movie titles, names of music albums, paintings and ships, for foreign words or quotations of texts in foreign language, for references of a word, letter or number as itself, when introducing or defining technical terms, for algebraic symbols, physical quantities and mathematical constants.

However, for anyone outside of the Western languages spectrum, it’s easy to dismiss this idea of italics and the emphasis by slightly slanting a character. Italics have commonly been attributed to the books published by Aldus Manutius, circa 1500, and it was not meant as an alternative style to the normal character set, but as a replacement. Entire books would be set in italics — an imitation of the fancy calligraphic style. And so, the italic style became the hottest thing:

…and 500 years ago the fashion was no different — the new style gained immediate popularity and began to spread even despite the fact, that the Venetian Senate granted Aldus exclusive right to use the italics. Once the new style was introduced, counterfeited italics started to be massively produced and used all over Europe

Different philosophies and arguments for the idea of highlighting important text began to emerge; from Marinetti’s “20 different typefaces” to Chicago’s “one italic”, stylistic ideas were aplenty.

As a curiosity, in the days of Latin as the international language of Europe often a different combination was used — Roman for Latin and blackletter for vernacular German: