Who wants to get emotional?
I thought they were all buried, but I've just come across samples of the handwriting of Sri Rupa and Sri Jiva Gosvamis.
Maybe I am the last to find out about them, but it was so intense to see them. I spent a long time observing them, noticing how Sri Rupa would write in Sanskrit with Bengali script, and Sri Jiva in Devanagari, seeing how it's not a perfect print, but a very personal handwriting of two real personalities.
To see them made everything feel so real and authentic.
Anyway, here they are
http://www.vaisnava.cz/fotky/vrindavan/vrindavan290-v.jpg
Who wants to get emotional?
Rupa Gosvami's sample looks almost too perfect for a handwriting. Too even, proportioned, condensed. Or it's perhaps a neat author's copy of an already completed piece? He must've had a neat handwriting style, considering he was working for the local Muslim government.
Jiva Gosvami's example looks more natural; it does look like a handwriting, it's more spontaneous: strokes are open, space not entirely calculated.
Btw, what they were using to write in those days? India ink on some kind of paper? Which tools they were using?
