Piranesi's Initials discovered on the Plan of Nero's Nimphæum (Fig.II and Fig.III) were engraved in 1756 for Le Antichità Romane Tom.I [Plate] XLI when his Roman architectural authority was under threat within the Græco-Romano debate of the mid eighteenth-century. By adding serifs to the ‘E’ [1] he argued that the ancient italians added serifs to the primitive Archaic Latin alphabet [2] which took 21 letters used in the ETRVSCAN alphabet. The unneeded Zeta [3] was moved to the end of the alphabet, and was replaced with Gamma [4] created from an Etruscan ‘C’. Following Rome’s conquest of Greece the Græca ‘Y’ [5] was added to Classical Latin. ‘V’ was used for ‘U’ and the medieval ligatured double ‘V’ became double-u 6. Eventually a curled minuscule ‘?’ became ‘J’ and ‘V’ became ‘U’ following the post-Rennaissance convention where ‘I’ and ‘U’ were used as vowels, and ‘J’ and ‘V’ as consonants.
Piranesi's decorative [NER]ONIONIANA initial majuscules are included in the regular and bold weights of the ETRVSCA Sans font family.
