The drawing is in fact a copy of one made in 1763 by George Dance, the architect to whom Soane had been apprenticed. Its suitability for association with Soane’s own minimalist version of Roman architecture seemed obvious, and also with the basic geometrical forms that underlie the work of contemporary neo-classical architects from Boullée to Jefferson. (The serifs are hardly noticeable in fact.) The Tempio della Sibilla dates from the first century BCE, which was still the Republican era of Rome, and what is left of the inscription has geometrical letters, monoline, with minimal serifs. Just too late for my article in Typographica I came across the drawings by Soane of the inscription of the little round temple at Tivoli near Rome (they were used for the cover of the book in 1999), and suddenly I thought I understood where he got his idea for a monoline letter. I had included some examples of the use of sanserif lettering by John Soane, since I had a hunch that he was among the early users.
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