De Maatschappij ter Bevordering van Toonkunst, haar Muziekfeest en de stad Rotterdam. herinnering aan het jaar 1854 1855

Koenraad Fuhri created this print in 1855 to commemorate the music festival held by the Society for the Promotion of Music in Rotterdam the previous year. The dominant visual element is the text itself, proclaiming the event and its organizers. Lettering, from antiquity to the Renaissance, has been seen as a carrier of power, a way to invoke the authority and spirit of the text. In medieval illuminated manuscripts, the initial letters of chapters were often lavishly decorated, embodying the sacred nature of the word. This reverence evolved in the Renaissance, where the style of lettering in printed books was designed to convey humanist ideals and classical wisdom, harkening back to the gravitas of ancient Roman inscriptions. The careful arrangement and choice of typeface here speaks to a deeper desire to imbue the festival with prestige and lasting cultural significance. The very act of memorializing the event through print suggests a yearning to fix it in time, to make it resonate beyond its immediate context.