With Dulcinea, Ramiro Espinoza explores Spanish baroque calligraphy’s most extreme tendencies, exemplified in the work of Pedro Díaz Morante and Juan Claudio Aznar de Polanco. With their plentiful calligraphic flourishes, the alphabets of these writing masters represented a marked break with the harmonic, angular Cancellaresca style dominant during the Renaissance. In naming this script, Espinoza pays homage to Dulcinea del Toboso, the fictional heroine of Miguel de Cervantes’s seventeenth-century classic, “Don Quixote.” Far from a mere revival, Dulcinea deftly combines quirks from the period with the playful spirit of the original. An array of delicate ligatures, swashes, and alternate characters enhance opportunities for sophisticated typography. Retype, 2018.
