Our Notes & References

A new monastery celebrated with beauty and writing: a refined, elegant and large-format calligraphic manual for Armenian letters, entirely lithographed and printed to inaugurate the construction of the Mekhitarist monastery in Vienna.

Very rare with only two complete copies traced (Eton and Austrian State Library); an incomplete copy at the BL, missing the last of the four parts originally forming the work. The Armenian National Library seems to have a volume with the same title on wrappers but an entirely different content.

The Mekhitarists of Vienna and Venice were the major centres of Armenian intellectual culture for more than a century. While the homeland remained part of the Ottoman Empire, the two monasteries translated and printed large quantities of literature, in accordance with their founder’s wish that the Armenian masses should receive the best of the Enlightenment. They also had a profound impact on visual culture, designing new typefaces and calligraphic styles in which to print their steady output of books.

Following the first calligraphic specimens printed by the Venetian house in 1834, these letters show the influence of nineteenth-century European styles, reflecting the Mekhitarists’ position as intermediaries between East and West. These were mostly used for title pages, with most text continuing to be printed in the traditional bolorgir font (cf. Papassissa).

The first title page here is beautifully decorated with letters in the Tuscan style (highly ornamented with bi- and trifurcated serifs), and depicts the original plans for the Viennese monastery, whose construction began the year after publication. The complex, originally situated beyond the city walls, has long since been incorporated into the urban landscape, but appears here as it would have in the nineteenth century, a bucolic sight surrounded by letters and by putti industriously practising their Armenian handwriting.

The Viennese Mekhitarists seemingly had a more whimsical style than their Venetian mother house, and decorated the pages of this manual with fantastic, playful figures built out of lines and letters — and in one case with a literal calligraphic hand.

Bibliography

Papassissa, Elena. 2019. ‘Conventions, Traditionalism, Latinisation, and Modernity in Armenian Typefaces across Type-Making Technologies from 1512 to 1977’. University of Reading.