"You weren't made to be brute, rather to seek for virtue and knowledge".

I have always found so true and full of meaning these lines from the Divine Comedy, spoken by Ulysses in Canto XXVI of Hell.

Designing this piece took me 2 days and a half: finding the right proportion with the gothic, stretched, but still legible, thinking of Rudolph Koch, then define the nib size who could fit the page and create almost a circle, but not too close to 360° (it would have killed the red text) nor to 180° (the global effect would have been missed).

Later, shape of letters, which are thicker at the top and thinner at the bottom, otherwise the would have been too much packed at the bottom and too much spaced at the top.

Finally, finding the right mixture of white and black gouache and keeping it for the whole peace, adding water and color in order to have the last letter consistant with the first one - and I did it in August!

Compared to this, the red letters were easy task to accomplish ;-) 

So here is the piece completed. Hope you like it - I made some prints of this :-D