Champ Fleury

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Geoffroy Tory (born c. 1480, Bourges, Fr.—died c. 1533, Paris) was a publisher, printer, author, orthographic reformer, and prolific engraver who was mainly responsible for the French Renaissance style of book decoration and who played a leading part in popularizing in France the roman letter as against the prevailing Gothic.

Like Durer, whom he criticizes, he shows how to draw letters with geometrical aids, and how their proportions relate to the human body. Although the book was not aimed at the printing trade, the work is mentioned by many subsequent writers on lettering and printing and has had a great influence on typography.

Massin, Letter and Image: The artists of the Renaissance were, as is well known, painters, engravers, geometricians, architects, writers, theorists at one and the same time. They tried to master all that was known at that time (Rabelais doctor, writer, philosopher is a case in point). It is therefore not surprising to find mathematics so closely bound up with their art, and especially with their graphic and typographic expression. In fact all artists of the time, Durer in Germany, Leonardo da Vinci, Pacioli and Vincentino in Italy, Tory and Le Bé in France, were steeped in the Pythagorean tradition and made the proportions of letters conform to architecture and geometry. Most of them wrote treatises in which they expressed their theories and their ideas, which differ very little from one author or country to another: besides having a common source of inspiration, they had at that time no scruples about copying a neighbour, and it is difficult, for instance, to see what distinguishes the theories of Brother Luca Pacioli, author of the Divina Proportione, from those of Leonardo.

On the contrary, in his Champ Fleury (1529) Geoffroy Tory pays homage to Vitruvius, 'prince of writers on architecture and buildings', who tried to determine, before he died, the proportions of the human form by means of geometry. But what makes the Champ Fleury an outstanding book and confers originality on its author is Tory's discovery that all the letters of the Latin alphabet can be reduced to the proportions of the human face and body. 'I know no author, whether Greek, Latin or French, who gives the proportion of letters as I have done, for which reason I call it my invention, since I conceived and learnt of it rather by divine inspiration than from any writing or hearsay.' Moreover, letters are for Tory 'so naturally well proportioned that like the human body they are composed of members, that is to say of measurements, of points and lines consisting of equal and unequal divisions . .It is true, as Gustave Cohen, who reprinted the work four hundred years after its original publication, wrote, that Tory inherited from Direr and in particular from Leonardo 'this tendency to see and seek everywhere, in their humblest forms, the sign of man, the hand of God and the marvellous unity of the universe'.

Tory: I have drawn the golden bough according to Virgil in the verses hereinbefore quoted, which, as have said, signifies learning; & beneath it the limb without leaves, which denotes ignorance. But note well how, on the said golden bough, I have drawn three twigs, of which the one in the middle, which is the chief & longest one, has nine leaves, wherein are written, one apart from another, the nine mutes, B, C, D, F, G, K, P, Q,T, which represent the nine Muses. Then, on another twig, at the left side, there are seven leaves wherein in like manner are written the seven semi-vowels, L, M, N, R, S, X, and Z, which represent the seven Liberal Arts. Likewise the third, right-hand twig has on it seven leaves, wherein are written the five Latin vowels, A, E, I, O, V, and one Greek one, Y, and with them the aspirate H, which, because it is not deemed a true letter, 1s written in the lowest leaf. By which six vowels and aspirate, we understand the four Cardinal Virtues & the Graces, of comely grace and virtue. Thus, then, in the said Golden Bough of Virgil are comprised and covertly suggested the nine Muses, the seven Liberal Arts, the four Cardinal Virtues, and the three Graces, which make the full number of the three-and-twenty letters of the Alphabet.

Massin: Yet Tory goes one step further: he enclosed in the letter O, with its perfect circle, the seven liberal arts, and gave to I, another basic letter, the task of representing the nine muses. Finally, encouraged no doubt by the daringness of his invention and quite undeterred by any acrobatic figure, he combined these seven liberal arts and the nine muses in the design of a flageolet (a kind of flute with seven holes) which, seen from behind and in perspective, resembles both a standing O and a recumbent I. Combining the straight line and the circle, these two letters symbolise the two generative organs; from this union, under the sign of the goddess Io, are born all the letters of the alphabet Finally, freehand and with the help of a compass, Tory arranges the twenty-three letters of the alphabet as it then was round a central O representing a sun, whose twenty-three rays are the nine muses, the seven liberal arts, the four cardinal virtues and the three graces.

Twenty-three letters are considered in the Champ Fleury, commented on and described in detail with a meticulous care that is somewhat reminiscent of a scientist with his microscope ; some are particularly worthy of note.

The letter A 'has its legs stretched out and spread wide, like a man's feet and legs when he is walking along'. Moreover, the transversal bar of the A 'exactly covers man's genital member to denote that modesty and chastity are to be desired above all things in those who seek access and entry to the world of letters, to which the A is the doorway, being the first letter in all alphabets'. Elsewhere Tory builds the A with a ruler and compass which represent the king and queen respectively.

The letter D is like 'the stage of a theatre, such as that which I saw in a city near Avignon on the Rhone' This stage, which has its "front edge in a straight line and the back in round half-circle can be very easily seen as a letter D'.

The letter H represents the body of a house, in that the part below the transverse line which have called central and diametrical is to contain the lesser rooms and chambers. And the part above is thus for the greater rooms or greater and middlesized rooms'.
The letter I: 'I cannot proceed further without mentioning that our letters owed their invention to divine inspiration. Certainly, at the beginning of the eighth book of the Iliad, Homer, king of Greek poets, told how once upon a time Jupiter declared that if he wished he could pull towards him by means of a golden chain, all the other gods, and even the earth and the sea as well'. If we imagine this golden chain hanging down from the sky to reach our feet, we can see that it is in 'length and breadth comparable in proportion and symmetry to the letter This theme of a golden chain runs through all Tory's work, sometimes linked to other allegories, such as that of the golden branch 'which has twenty-three letters leaves which mysteriously symbolize the twenty-three of the alphabet'. This last image, borrowed from Virgil, shows the influence of the classics and Italy on Tory. I have seen the Coliseum more than a thousand times', he says. And the Coliseum had, when it was still whole, the shape of the letter O, 'round outside and inside oval shaped'.
The letter L is illustrated by another allegory, of the sign of Libra. It is shaped like the human body and its shadow, 'the sun being in the sign of the Scales' The letter M however, has a more prosaic interpretation : it is 'like certain men, who are so fat that their belts are larger than the height of their body'. But it is Q which gives rise to the most amusing comparison. After having noted that 'this letter Q is the only one of all the letters which steps out of line downwards', for which no one, Tory says, had been able to give him a good reason, he continues by saying: 'I have so pondered and puzzled on these so-called ancient letters, that I have discovered that Q steps out of line because it is never written in any word without its companion and good friend U, and to show that it desires this letter always to follow it, it stretches out its tail below to embrace it. . .
To pronounce the letter S, is 'to hiss, as powerfully as a redhot iron when it is plunged into water'.
Finally, the letter Y, like the 'vanities' painted by the contemporaries of Tory, is the sign of pleasure and virtue.

Conscious of the originality of his approach and of the dialectical excesses to which it might lead him, Geoffroy Tory forestalled the criticisms that might be aimed at him. 'I have no doubt that detractors and tiresome people will sneer at it', he prophesied; but that did not stop him writing his 'fantasy and speculative work, to be of pleasure and service to good students'.

Sworn enemy of pedantry, Tory equals Rabelais (who was possibly born in the same year as him) in gaiety, good humour and pertinent wit. Here, for example, is how the first book of the Champ Fleury begins: 'On the morning after Twelfth night, after having partaken of : restful sleep, and my stomach having digested, lightly and joyously, the fact that it was now 1523, I began to ponder as I lay in bed and go back over various things in my memory, thinking a thousand inconsequential thoughts, both light and serious, and so doing I remembered an antique letter I had drawn long ago Indeed, this key book is of far more interest than a mere sample alphabet (even if the Champ Fleury was only that, it would still be attractive enough in conception and presentation). In addition to its philological interest it gives valuable indications of the spelling and pronunciation of the time and the graphical notation of accents, apostrophes and the cedilla, which it introduced, the Champ Fleury has played a considerable part in the evolution of French typography. It was, in fact, during the ten years after its publication that roman characters were definitively substituted for the bastard Gothic ones (which are so close in style to manuscript writing) and also superseded the italic letter made fashionable by the Aldine editions.

Apart from different versions of sans-serif type, all descended from the German Bauhaus school which itself developed from the medieval Gothic tradition, the majority of countries which today use the Latin alphabet have found nothing else to offer in the way of typographical print other than Garamond. Which, imbued as it is with the spirit of the Renaissance, was designed in 1545 by Claude Garamond - who was, in fact the pupil of Geoffroy Tory."

in Drucker & McVarish, Graphic Design History: Tory's design for a constructed initial was based on the application of geometrical principles to the creation of ideal letterforms. Such approaches were not applied strictly mechanically in the Renaissance any more than they had been in antiquity. Adjustments that took the eye and hand into account belonged to the period's aesthetic. Although Tory's work was far from mechanistic. it did have a rational basis in principles of order and measure that could be extrapolated as rules for graphic design.

In A.D. Reader Pt 1: