Venetian 301 is the Bitstream version of the Centaur type family.

Centaur was designed by the American book designer Bruce Rogers on the basis of Venetian typefaces of 1470 of Nicolas Jenson. Beautiful Italic based on a face by Ludovico degli Arrighi was developed by Frederic Warde who was an American calligrapher and typography researcher was added as Italic to Centaur. Adapted for mechanical composition by English Monotype in 1929. Its lettershapes owe much to pen-drawn letters of Italian humanist minuscule and cursive.

This elegant humanist face is useful for the finest typography both for book text and display matter. Cyrillic version included small caps was developed for ParaType in 2003 by Dmitry Kirsanov.