Beatrix Antiqua is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Francesco Canovaro. Beatrix Antiqua is part of the Beatrix Family that takes its inspiration from the classic Roman monumental capital model: its capitals are directly derived from the stone carvings in Florence Santa Croce Cathedral – where the serifs are often removed while keeping the variable width strokes.
So, even if it’s basically a sans-serif, Beatrix keeps a subtle swelling at the terminals suggesting a glyphic serif – in the same vein as Herman Zapf classic Optima typeface. In the lowercase design, Beatrix references early humanist typefaces, keeping small calligraphic details (as the prolongation of the e nose) that are especially visible in the italics.
While Beatrix Antiqua, the companion typeface to Beatrix Nova, slightly exaggerates its antique stylistical features, Beatrix Nova tries to mix those influence with a more robust & digital age ready design, featuring bigger X-height and an extended character set that covers over forty languages using the latin alphabet, as well as Greek and Russian Cyrillic.
