Minerals - Copper - Italian Hand

"Copper is such an important, interesting, and basically essential mineral it would be easy to write an entire book on it. This small specimen from my collection was bright & shiny when I bought it years ago, but has since oxidized. The symbol for copper is Cu from the Latin Cuprum. Easily distinguishable and usable directly from the ground, copper was the first metal to be smelted by humans ending the Stone Age around 7000 years ago (use of gold began about the same time). Copper was also the first to be cast into shapes, and the first to be used to create alloys, leading to the Bronze age. Used originally for everything from money, to tools, to jewelry due to its ductilibility and toughness; later it was prized for its more complex properties, such as: conduction of heat and electricity, its corrosion resistance, antibacterial properties, as a pigment in glass & paints, and an important mineral in medicine and the body's metabolism.

Calligraphically… Copper is a deceptively simple word with the o, e, & r providing limited options for getting fancy, the greatest opportunities come from the double-p, and of course, the capital C. This example of Italian Hand is in the late English style. The C, double-p with an unorthodox 'o-p' ligature are my own contrivance. The 'pp' actually came to me quite clearly in a vision as I was thinking about doing this mineral the day before starting, which is why it became the next in my Mineral Script series. While the style of this double-p may follow the late English form (early 1800s), the ductus is more akin to the early English style (late 1600s)."

~2017, Don Marsh~
©2017 Don Marsh