Rev. Robert Palladino, Scribe Who Shaped Apple’s Fonts, Dies at 83 - NYTimes.com
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The monk was the Rev. Robert Palladino, who died on Feb. 26 at 83. A Roman Catholic priest who began his vocation in a monastic order, Father Palladino was also a world-renowned master of calligraphy.
“Priest and calligrapher,” his business card read, in his unimpeachable Renaissance italic, and he long plied both trades at once. For years, babies he baptized received baptismal certificates in his flawless hand. In Oregon, where he made his home, Father Palladino hand-lettered the state medical licenses for generations of newly minted doctors.
As a Trappist brother, Father Palladino learned his art in silence, honed it over years of study and eventually, on leaving his order, taught it to others.
To his students, he brought a world of genteel scholarship and quiet contemplation; a world whose modus operandi — by hand, with ink, on paper, parchment and vellum — was little changed for centuries; a world of classical music (an accomplished singer, he liked to ply his calligraphy to Beethoven), Gregorian chant and the Latin Mass, which he continued celebrating in discreet defiance long after Vatican II.
Into that world burst a young college dropout named Steve Jobs.
It is a coincidence no less exquisite than Father Palladino’s finest calligraphy that “Silicon Valley’s future most famous screamer studied with a monk who spent years taking a vow of silence,” as The Hollywood Reporter wrote shortly after Mr. Jobs’s death in 2011.
The Trappist monk whose calligraphy inspired Steve Jobs — and influenced Apple’s designs
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/03/08/the-trappist-monk-whose-calligraphy-inspired-steve-jobs-and-influenc
“He found it amusing that he would be remembered primarily as the calligraphy teacher of Steve Jobs, especially since Robert did not own and never used a computer,” Calligraphy Initiative Coordinator Gregory MacNaughton said in a Reed College statement announcing Palladino’s death.
Jobs was just one of hundreds of students Palladino taught, at Reed, and also at Portland State University, Marylhurst University and the Portland Art Museum, according to the 2003 profile.
