Swashes on Caps By Pandora

Adding a flourish to an uppercase letterform is not unlike pinning a silk flower to the lapel of a gray flower suit. It can look gaudy but it is exactly what type designers have done since the end of the nineteenth century.

Swashed capital letters, so the reasoning went, would be useful to mark the begining of a sentence or paragraph, emphasize the first letter of a name, or higlight the title of a book.

 

In the eighteenth century, swashes were also added to some lowercase letterforms to confer a distinctive  calligraphic edge to announcements and calling cards.
Phil Barnes's cover in 2004 for a book of meditations by Marcus Aurelius used swashed letters.