Some time in the past month, the fonts Emacs uses for italic and
variable pitch have changed.

In ~/.Xdefaults I have:

Emacs.font: -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--15-140-75-75-c-90-iso8859-1

In ~/.emacs, I have

(face-spec-set 'italic
                   '((t (:slant italic :underline nil :family "helvetica"))))

In a CVS version from 2009-11-03, I get the following fonts for italic
and variable-pitch:

x:-adobe-helvetica-medium-o-normal--14-140-75-75-p-78-iso8859-1
xft:-unknown-DejaVu LGC Sans-normal-normal-normal-*-15-*-*-*-*-0-iso10646-1

In the current trunk, I get:
x:-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--15-140-75-75-c-90-iso8859-1
x:-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--15-140-75-75-c-90-iso8859-1

Is there some way I can get the previous fonts back?

font-show-log output is attached.

In GNU Emacs 23.1.50.1 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, X toolkit)
Windowing system distributor `The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.70101000
configured using `configure '--with-pop' '--without-xaw3d' '--without-xim'
 '--x-libraries=/usr/lib64' '--x-includes=/usr/include/X11' '--with-x'
 '--with-x-toolkit=athena' '--without-toolkit-scroll-bars''