Edward Catich
| The Reverend
Edward M. Catich | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1906
Stevensville, Montana |
| Died | April 14, 1979
Davenport, Iowa |
| Nationality | United States |
| Known for | Education, calligraphy |
Edward M. Catich (1906–1979) was an American Roman Catholic priest, teacher, and calligrapher.
He is noted for the fullest development of the thesis that the inscribed Roman square capitals of the Augustan age and afterward owed their form (and their characteristic serifs) wholly to the use of the flat brush, rather than to the exigencies of the chisel or other stone cutting tools.
Life
His parents died when he was 11, and he and three brothers (including his twin) were taken by train to the orphanage of the Loyal Order of Moose, the Mooseheart campus near Aurora, Illinois.
At the orphanage he apprenticed under sign-writer Walter Heberling.
After graduating high school in 1924, Catich toured with a Mooseheart band, and then went to Chicago, where he played music in bands.
Catich studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1926–29, and supported himself as a union sign-writer.
Catich attended where he worked as the leader of the school band.
He received a master's degree in art at University of Iowa in Iowa City.
In 1935, Catich traveled to Rome to study at Pontifical Gregorian University for the Catholic priesthood, where he also made a study of archaeology and paleography.
He was ordained in 1938 and returned to Iowa to teach art, math, engineering, and music at St. Ambrose.
As a priest, he served in parishes of the Diocese of Peoria, including ones in Atkinson and Hooppole.
Throughout much of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Catich found himself making trips to Massachusetts to work on his calligraphy with W.A.
Dwiggins.
It was during these trips that he began to explore deep into the Trajan column that would become his life's work.
During the 1950s, 1960s, and even into the 1970s, Catich would make many trips to Rome to explore the Roman capitals.
Catich taught at St. Ambrose for forty years, until his death in 1979.
The Davenport, Iowa, university now holds some 4,000 of his works, many from his legacy to Professor John Schmits, housed at the Edward M. Catich Memorial Gallery.
The gallery was originally his studio and press at the Galvin Fine Arts Center and was built with a donation from Hallmark Cards, where several of his students worked.
In the years following his death, many of Catich's theories about the Roman Capitals would be adopted.
He had ties to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Encyclopædia Britannica, and the Houghton Library at Harvard, and was a founder of the Catholic Art Association.
Credits to the contents of this page go to the authors of the corresponding Wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward Catich.