Graduale, pars de tempore
This is a Latin choir manuscript, a graduale of chants for the temporal cycle of the liturgical year, copied by hand around 1550 for use in church services. Its pages show square musical notation on red and black staff lines beside large blue and brown decorated initials, with red rubrics marking the chant names. A designer might take the sharp contrast of ornamental capitals against plain text blocks and the bold hand-drawn staff layouts as models for decorative initials and grid-based typography.
