Geoffroy Tory

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Geoffroy Tory (* 1480 in Bourges , † 1533 in Paris ) was a French printer and scholar . In 1530 Francis I appointed him printer of the king (" Imprimeur du Roi ").

Life

Geoffroy Tory was born in 1480 in the suburb of Saint-Privé of Bourges and studied at the Faculty of Philosophy in Bourges. The city of Bourges was considered the center of humanistic culture. From 1505 to 1506 Tory made his first trip to Italy and studied at the Sapienza University of Rome and at the University of Bologna . He also studied with Philippe Beroalde and Jean-Baptiste le Pitoyable (Johannes Baptista Pius), established contact with Italian humanists and ended his studies with this trip. Finishing your studies with a cultural trip to Italy was a tradition in the 16th century. During this first trip to Italy, Erasmus von Rotterdam also studied at the University of Bologna. Tory ended his stay in Bologna because of the death of his professor Philippe Beroalde in 1505.

Tory returned to Paris around 1506/1507, taught at the Collège du Plessis , the Collège de Coqueret and later he taught philosophy at the Collège de Bourgogne (1513) and lived in Paris in the following years. In 1512 he married Perrette le Hulin and his daughter Agnès was born. In 1515 he interrupted his work at the university to travel to Italy again. However, this second trip to Italy was not a cultural trip, but rather it gave Tory the opportunity to expand his knowledge and to create the basis for his later activities in book printing and book art.

On his return in 1518, he left the university, founded Rue Saint-Jacques , a woodcut atelier and opened a bookshop near the Pont Neuf in Paris. In 1529 he published his work Champfleury , in which he connected the letters of the alphabet with the proportions of the human body and developed new typographical print letters ( accents , apostrophes , cedilla ). Claude Garamond learned the handicraft of type cutting from him .

Geoffroy Tory died in Paris in 1533.

Publications

As a printer:

He also published historical works, Latin grammars and the Institutiones oratorie by Quintilian . Tory also maintained contact with the most important book printers in Paris and worked as a proofreader for Gilles de Gourmont , who also published the first text. He had a close relationship especially with Henri Estienne and Josse Bade since the printing of the Cosmographia and the Elegies of 1510. Before the publication of his book Champfleury in 1529, he had already printed other books in collaboration with Simon de Colines .

As an author:

  • 1513: Prosopopeia Neminis
  • 1539: Aediloquium seu disticha, partibus aedium urbanarum et rusticarum suis quaque adscribenda
  • 1529: Champ Fleury. Auquel est contenu l'art et science de la deue, et vraie proportion des lettres Attiques, lettres Antiques au Romaines
Letter A from Champ Fleury , 1529

Champfleury

General

The work Champfleury was published in 1529 in Paris in French and is a treatise on questions of printing and the French language. On the front page it says:

"CHAMPFLEURY, auquel est contenu l'art et science de la deue et vraye proportion des lettres attiques, qu'on dit autrement lettres antiques et vulgairement lettre romaines proportionnées selon le corps et visage humain."

"Flower garden, in which the art and science are contained in the correct and true proportion of the Attic, also ancient and usually Roman letters, according to the measure of the human body and face."

Le Champ Fleury (the blooming field) symbolizes paradise, the place where the gods of love rule. At the same time, the work is reminiscent of Antoine Vérard's Le Jardin de Plaisance et fleur Rhétorique (1501) . The works of Tory and Vérard differ in content, but both use the image of a field of flowers to show that anyone can pick these flowers. In reference to Champfleury , Geoffroy Tory describes the flourishing field as the French language, which has the ability to develop and develop.

Tory intended with his work to set up the Latin letters for the letterpress and to replace the Gothic Fraktur with the antique printing . He clarifies these considerations with geometric drawings based on the proportions of the human body.

The Italian humanists Leon Battista Alberti and Albrecht Dürer as well as Leonardo da Vinci and Luca Pacioli ( De divina proportione ) developed such conceptual and graphic constructions. Albrecht Dürer's work shows the unity of architecture and geometry, in which he constructs his drawings and thus sees geometry as a language.

Tory's work Champfleury is a valuable testimony to the early Renaissance in France. The prevailing humanism at this time strived to introduce the Latin letters and to see in people the measure of all things. This view is also reflected in the letters of Tory. In addition, both ancient and Italian influences can be found in his work.

Ancient influences in Tory's reflections are related to the Canon de Polyclète by Vitruvius , a treatise on architecture in which he depicts a young man who is neither tall nor short or neither fat nor thin and who creates the image of a well-formed person. This is characterized by its adaptability and flexibility.

Italian influences are evident from the mention of Luca Pacioli, Leon Battista Alberti and Ludovico Vicentino . Ludovico Vicentino is considered the most famous master of writing of his time and is known as a printer.

In addition to the development of the letters, Tory adds explanations of the letters and explains their real, allegorical, moral and theological meaning in the manner of medieval scholastic exegesis . However, Champfleury should not only provide printing instructions. Tory loves his mother tongue, une des plus gracieuses de toutes les langues humaines (one of the most graceful of all human languages) and defends it against Latin alienation by calling for the correct use of French. This admonition is taken up again by du Bellay in his Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549) . Tory, like Rabelais later in the figure of the écolier limousin (the student from Limoges in the Pantagruel ), mocks the preference of the French to latinize their language.

Among other things, it was Tory's aim to make the development of different sized ancient letters possible (e.g. to use them for cornices of a triumphal arch) and he dealt with the history of dialectal geography and the chronology of certain phonetic changes in France.

Furthermore, Geoffroy Tory gives suggestions in his work for the specification of the French orthography, for example by the introduction of accents, apostrophes and cedilla. He justifies this mainly with the fact that the French language has no orthographic characters and thus the language has no rules as there are in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. In 1531 Tory introduced the cedilla and in the fourth edition of L'Adolescence Clementine by Clément Marot perfected the system of auxiliary signs, which included apostrophes. Also in the works deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse of Joachim du Bellay , identical ideas to make orthography recognize.

content

Geoffroy Tory divides his work into three books and an appendix.

In the first book , Tory speaks of the desire to familiarize his countrymen with the ancient letters. From this point of view, he not only thinks about education as a moral obligation towards future generations, but also wonders whether Champfleury should be written in Latin or French. Furthermore, in the first book, Tory mentions the need for grammatical rules and at the end of his reflections gives a draft of the history of writing.

Tory deals in the second book with the development of theories about the alphabet. There are two approaches for his considerations: on the one hand he develops a system for the construction of letters according to the proportions of the human body and on the other hand he relates this at the same time to a mythological content.

Geoffroy Tory constructs the letters geometrically and gives them a symbolic interpretation. The starting point of his construction of the Roman capital letters are the letters I and O. The letter I stands for a straight line, the letter O for a circle. These form the basis for other letters, which can be constructed with the help of straight lines and circle segments.

The reference system for the letters is a square in which the letters are written and which is divided into the smallest units. Horizontal and vertical lines as well as diagonals and the circle inside the square are further elements of the construction.

Geoffroy Tory establishes the relationship between the letters and the proportions of the human body by measuring I and O.

He applies the measurements of writing (based on the proportions of the body) to a mythological content. Apollo and his muses form the basic scheme for the considerations.

In the third book of Champfleury Tory insights Roman grammarians, especially cites Priscian which apart sat down with the letters and their use. However, there are also own, personal linguistic considerations of Tory, which refer to the French dialects and their phonetic peculiarities (e final, s final). In addition, he comments on and interprets the various ways of pronouncing Latin in different countries.

The appendix by Champfleury deals with the main scripts, such as Hebrew, Greek, Latin or French, and provides explanations. He also added certain numbers of the alphabet to his drawings and classified the different fonts: he called the "Lettre de Forme", "Lettre Bastarde", "Lettres Tourneures" and the "Lettres Fantasique, Lettres Fleuries". Tory describes the "Lettre de Forme" and "Lettre Bastarde" as Gothic fonts, which he replaced with the Antiqua printing.

literature

  • Geofroy Tory: Champ fleury. Ou l'art et science de la proportion des lettres. Slatkine Reprints, Geneva 1973.
  • Geofroy Tory: Champ fleury. Art et science de la vraie proportion des lettres. [Fac-simile de l'éd. de 1529] Bibliothèque de l'Image, Paris 1998. ISBN 978-2-909808-58-1 .
  • Auguste Bernard: Geofroy Tory, peintre et graveur, premier imprimeur royal, réformateur de l'orthographe et de la typographie sous François Ier. (1857) 2nd edition. de Graaf, Nieuwkoop 1963.
  • Walter Jens (ed.): Kindlers New Literature Lexicon . Volume 16, Munich 1991.
  • Bookbinding (history) . In: Meyers Konversations-Lexikon . 1885-1892, Volume 3, p. 546.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Stefan Waidmann: Font and typography. Sulgen (CH) 1999, p. 9.
  2. ^ A b Walter Jens (ed.): Kindlers New Literature Lexicon . Volume 16, Munich 1991, p. 727.
  3. ↑ Geoffroy Tory: Champfleury. Ou l'art et science de la proportion des Lettres. Geneva 1973.
personal data
SURNAME Tory, Geoffroy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French printer, scholar, poet and translator
DATE OF BIRTH 1480
PLACE OF BIRTH Bourges
DATE OF DEATH 1533
Place of death Paris