Chapter Title: The Letter and the Grid: Geoffroy Tory

Book Title: The Self-Made Map

Book Subtitle: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France
Book Author(s): Tom Conley
Published by: University of Minnesota Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.cttttbqv.7

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 2

The Letter and the Grid: Geoffroy Tory

The writings of Geoffroy Tory, a printer and typographer from Bourges who
lived and worked in Paris, are not generally associated with cartographic revo-
lution. They pertain to the art of print culture and stand as handsome evi-
dence of the dramatic changes that took place in printing ateliers from 1515 to
the 15305. Tory's most celebrated work, a manual for the design of letters that
bears the prepossessing title Champ fleury, Auquel est contenu Ian & Science de
la deue dr vraye Proportion des Lettres Attiques, quon dit autrement lettres an-
tiques, df vulgairement Lettres romaines proportionnees selon le Corps dr visage
humain (Paris, 1529), is said to have utterly changed the face of the printed
page in France during the humanist years (Catach 1968; Brun 1930, 1969;
Butsch 1969).! His method for the construction of a classical, or "Attic," letter
is the foundation of the aspect of typefaces that the Renaissance has be-
queathed to us. Tory shifts print culture away from incunabular styles, which
used a fairly standardized font, die lettre de forme, the lettre batarde, and the
lettre ronde. He showed his readers how to design a font with a calm and clas-
sical measure, a font that marries the symmetrical ideal of the Vitruvian man,
that is, the human being made in proportion to the world at large, to the
geometer's circle, square, and triangle. He ushers in a graphic shape that char-
acterizes the ferment in French letters during the 15305. At the same time, he
both sums up and praises shapes that had been current in France since the end
of the fourteenth century (Saenger 1977).
In this chapter, I would like to argue that Tory's writings in general, and the

62

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 THE LETTER AND THE GRID 63

Champ fleury in particular, theorize the spatial imagination that had been
nascently binding writing to geography, at least in the ways that the relation is
evinced in the vernacular poetry of Jean Molinet and in the form of Les cent
nouvelles nouvelles. Tory's work specifies much of what we have seen already
operating latently. The typographer further explores some of the implicit traits
of mapping and writing in his concerted effort to project the image of a
national and a historically founded space. Much of what he puts forward tells
of the climate in which grows the cartographic work of Oronce Fine. In its
broad strokes, Tory's graphic imagination emphasizes a strongly allegorical and
spatial sensibility of writing that will dominate much of the sixteenth century's
relations with language and extension.2
The Champ fleury deals with many topics, not the least of which is the syn-
thesis of mythography, geography, and orthography. The way Tory goes about
describing a French heritage of writing and perspective determines not only
the project for a new "language map" of Gallia but also a spatial and volumet-
ric poetics of printed writing. He correlates the graphic impulse, the literary
imagination, and the desire of plotting. Most important, Tory may be the first
humanist to offer a logical nomenclature for printed and manuscript types
that had become increasingly standardized with the advent of a growing liter-
ate class of students and of a nobility that, as of 1360, cultivated vernacular
texts copied in a Gothic cursive style. From this background, a specific vocabu-
lary emerged, reflecting a growing uniformity of patterns of script. Tory's great
contribution to print culture, remarks Paul Saenger, "consists in the establish-
ment of the canons of a vocabulary for gothic writings in books" and in the
correct reproduction of the proportions that accounted for both the height
and the width of their letters (1977: 498—99, 505).
Above all, Tory knew how to name what he saw. The ability to detect and
label different types and styles betrays the cartographic quality of Tory's inno-
vations. For if Tory not only succeeds in distinguishing and classifying past
and present manuscript and printed styles, he also shows that a perspectival
distance exists between himself and the history of orthography. The nomen-
clature that is taken up in the final pages of the Champ fleury suggests that
Tory is in a position to see the range of the past forms of literacy from Greece
and Rome and that, because of this position, he is able to locate precisely how
typographic forms in aesthetic and political programs are anchored in recent
history. He allegorizes the past in terms of current ideological programs. Tory
thus becomes a major French exponent of a "Renaissance"—as opposed to a
re-nascence (Panofsky 1972)—of cultural materials. A reader quickly ascertains

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64 THE LETTER AND THE GRID

that his program espouses the mapping of a French space and, beneath it, a
specifically French history anchored in the authority of Greek myth.
The nomenclatures indicate that an objectifying perspective is brought to
medieval and classical writing in such a way that a component of distance
and point of view is visible throughout the treatise, both in the handling of
its topic and in the very printed letters that convey it. All of a sudden, the
printed page becomes a ground that can be subject to geometric operations;
it can be gridded, fashioned into prototypes of pixels, coordinated, graphed,
and even navigated.3 What may strike a contemporary reader as charming
but innocuously contrived allegories, momlites, or far-fetched memory im-
ages that correlate the square surround of the letter to the human body are
important to programs that project writing into space and that chart new
relations between the subject, the world, and modes of plotting. The author
advocates at once a new "design" of the alphabet and the development of an
apparatus of analysis that will map the ways readers and spectators can orient
themselves—by way of imagination and perspective—within and outside of
printed characters.

Three Allegories
The principal allegories are placed at the geometric center of the Champ fleury,
in the second part (Book 2, fols. xi-xxx), which is flanked by an exhortation in
defense of writing in French (Book i, fols. i-x) and a practical review of the
history, meaning, and geometric design of each of the twenty-three letters of
the alphabet (Book 3, fols. xxxi-lxvi). In the table of contents, Tory announces
that he has added "deux caietz a la fin" [two notebooks at the end] (fols.
Ixvii—Ixxx), which name and reproduce thirteen styles of letters, along with
"the instruction and manner of making ciphers of letters for golden rings,
for tapestries, stained-glass windows, paintings, and other apparently worthy
things" (fol. A.i v).4 Although the bulk of the work is taken up in the fifty-
eight folios that follow Book 2 and the lengthy appendixes, Tory makes it clear
from the start that "Ce toutal oeuure / est divise en Trois Livres" [this total
work is divided into three books] in order to set the allegories at a mathemati-
cal vanishing point, or to have linguistic history and typographic practice turn
about the axis of his theory. With an embedded configuration of this sort, a
distance is gained, and it is this distance that inspires the content of the work.
Here Tory launches his reform. He corrects the proportions established by
Luca Pacioli, Sigismundo de Fanti, and Lodovico Vincentino, and he modifies
the alphabet of Albrecht Diirer (fol. xiii) by establishing a ten-point scale for

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 THE LETTER AND THE GRID 65

Figure 2.1. The allegorized I and O (Geoffrey Tory, Champ fleury)

Roman capitals. The square proportion often vertical and ten horizontal units
lays out a grid whose area becomes what he calls the "body" of each letter. The
initial allegory, which spatializes and leads the discourse to the configuration,
is the upper-case /(Figure 2.1, top), which allots one "latitude" to each of the
nine muses and one to their complement, Apollo, who is perched at the top.
The second allegory, which draws out the capital O, inscribes Apollo on the
topmost rung above an echelon of the seven liberal arts (with the trivium at
the bottom), all contained within the periphery of the letter that occupies the
top and bottom lines (Figure 2.1, bottom). He conceives of the /as Virgil's

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66 THE LETTER AND THE GRID

Figure z.2. "Virgil's Flute in Perspective and Morality" (Geoffrey Tory,

Champ fleury)

flute standing on its end, with either seven (representing the liberal arts) or
nine (representing the muses) holes. The flute is then set on its side in order to
synthesize the medieval curriculum and the classical muses of the sciences.
The square has at each of its corners the four syllables of A-trem-pen-ce, or
Tem-pe-ran-ce, the muse of good works, of clocks, and of moderation, who
was an ideal for the ethic of the Protestant reform (Meiss 1974: 34-35). In
the remarkable memory picture "Virgil's Flute in Perspective and Morality"
(Figure 2.2), Tory sums up the first of his allegories: The O and /are seen to-
gether when the flute is placed on its side. The instrument moves into space
and points to a new axis or a vanishing point at the upper corner. Implied is
that the figure rolls about the axis, or that it can extend into space according to
a cartographic logic of extension from a center (at the juncture of the line
below Musica and the arc of the intrados of the O) to a corner, and then con-
stitute a new axis that will extend new circumferences (Edgerton 1987:10-14).
Tory congratulates himself for his wit.5 At the same time, he notes that the di-
agram is put forth unselfishly, "pour myeulx declarer 1'intention, le segret, & la
moralite des bons Anciens, & pour bailler enseignement & voye aux modernes
& amateurs de vrayes, pures, & bonnes lettres" [to declare better the inten-

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 THE LETTER AND THE GRID 67

tion, secret, and morality of the good classics, and to provide information and
a path for moderns and amateurs of true, pure, and good letters] (fol. xvi v).
The segret of which he writes may be located in the distance that is implied to
be held between the Attic O, and the older cursive style, the Lettre de forme that
names the device: The names of the medieval arts and the classical muses of
the sciences are written in the incunabular style, in contrast to the new letter
that conveys this memory. A sense of history is tipped into the graphic differ-
ences of typography and their respective referents. In this way, the O as flute is
inspired by Virgil's verse, but it sings of the ingenuity of Tory, the printer's in-
novation being seen at the rim of the instrument and in the volumetric plan of
the allegory. Hence, the past recedes into spaces along a diagonal axis while the
present is foregrounded on the surface defined by the body of the O. Crucial
to the design of this perspectival object is the correlation of a distance of time
that is measured by a digitized treatment of space.
The third principal allegory, of the Vitruvian man inscribed in the gridded
backdrop or body of the O, makes the extending, or cartographic, effect of the
grid and perspectival view of the /-as-flute come forth by virtue of contiguity.
Set on the opposite folio (fol. xvii), the figure immediately recalls the me-
dieval, "moralized" configuration of world maps of the fourteenth century. In
these creations, such as the Ebstorf map (Woodward and Harley 1987: 351), the
cruciform image of Christ forms the cardinal directions of the world. In 1529,
the reincarnation of the Vitruvian man could not fail to be laden with what
was a moralized geography of space (Schulz 1978). Here, as we see in the co-
extension of classical and Gothic print in the figure to the left, the resemblance
of Vitruvian man to the medieval mappae mundi, with their allegorical space,
whose four cardinal directions are made by analogy with Christ's four bodily
extremities, is no less evident. Two different modes of mapping are set forth in
the same image. One is clearly of a "past" moment and the other, in the same
image, heralds the here, the now, and the future of the typographer's innova-
tions. The expansive quality of the "new" form is, of course, marked by the
genitals at the axis of the circle and the interstices between the undrawn diag-
onals of the square. In Tory's system, it is not ironic that Clio, the muse of his-
tory, figures as part of the line that crosses the man's organ of perpetuation,
nor that the text explaining the drawing proposes "ung Enigme, cest a dire un
propos obscur" (an enigma, that is, an obscure statement), which makes the
meaning of the three lines of Latin a function of the scansion of their digits.
Reading the text is tantamount to a mensuration of words, that is, of imag-
ining them as equally sized units—like pixels—that are seen in a serial and
discrete configuration. Conversely, if the enigma (which solves its own riddle

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68 THE LETTER AND THE GRID

within its formulation) is applied to the allegorical picture, the world (shaped
in the image of a man) is lettered not in order to be moralized into abstraction
but to be defined in quantifiable and reiterable (or movable) units. Thus,
when Tory reduces the enigma to the cliche that "every natural thing is, and
consists in, number, and this number is either even or odd" (fol. xvii v), by
showing how the mouth, chin, head, navel and genitals are odd whereas the
eyes, feet, hands, and ears are even, he underscores the facticity of his analogy.
The remark indicates that the logic being presented cannot be trusted. He
becomes, in a word, a trickster: For although the mouth (bouche) or the chin
(mentori) is odd because it has no complement, its name is still even because its
name is composed of six letters. The arbitrary nature of the allegory comes to
the surface, but nonetheless the correlation of the form of expression (the
number of letters in the sign) to the shape of its referent (the single or double
nature of the bodily part being referred to) suggests that a generativity and a
possibility of growth or expansion into space is visible at the divided basis of
the axis of the frame and figure of the Vitruvian man.
Another dimension becomes apparent when the opposing folios are scanned.
The gigantic O on the left could quite possibly be fantasized as an extreme
closeup of the navel of the Vitruvian man on the right; or the perspectival unit
of both flat and rotund properties, and the erect flute as well, projected at a
penile angle, could be a magnification of the genitals to the right. The carto-
graphic virtue of expansion along a plan of center, circumference, and quin-
cunx is matched by an erotic quality in which the absent lips that would
pucker over the mouthpiece of the flute are at a point where the upper end
touches and defines a triangle, below which there drips a drop of fluid in
the shape of a flamboyant soufflet, the tracery pattern used in rose windows
and on heraldic arches. The opening onto the moralized perspective of the
flute from the upper left corner where the instrument touches the square is so
erogenously underwritten that the name of its side, "trem" of "Atrempance,"
turns the figure for devout and chaste labor into an activity of giving and
thrusting, of oscillating movement of male and female members of a self-
perpetuating dyad. It could be said that the cartographic dimension of the
two figures operates along a two-dimensional axis, and that the erotic side of
the figure is cosmographic insofar as a complete universe is fashioned from
a virtual model of infinite reproduction of volumes and of beings in three
dimensions.
Other variants in the same allegory subscribe to the scheme that super-
imposes components of mapping and generation from differences within and
across each scheme. Seven figures elaborate the analogy of the body and the

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 THE LETTER AND THE GRID 69

Figure 2.3. The quartered man who trains in the liberal arts (Geoffrey Tory,
Champ fleury)

letter (fols. xvii v-xix v). They play, first, on the identity of the navel and sex
organs as an axis for the circle and square surround. Noteworthy (in Figures
2.3 and 2.4) is how the figure is tortured by being constrained to obey
medieval lines of form that bend the body according to its design (Baltmsaitis
1931) and how it is positioned as if chained on a rack, even though all the while
it struggles against the outside forces that contain it. Its sex organ traces the
meridian that Tory has likened to the Y axis of inspiration, in contrast to the
X axis that is made of the equating lines associated with the long labors of
study. The meridian bisects the navel in a manner that suggests a generative
analogy in which
navel : travail/labor = penis : divine inspiration/calling

The eroticized geography is affirmed (as in Figure 2.3) where the sex organ
bears attributes that could be qualified as both male and female. It coyly an-
nounces the coming of the I-O analogy (Figure 2.4), in which the body (the
gridded square) of the letter contains both odd and even and male and female
elements.
The allegory plays tricks in its ulterior manifestations. In Tory's explana-
tion of the "chaste" character of the great initial A (Figure 2.5), the transverse
bar below the median horizontal covers the man's pubis "in order to denote

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7o THE LETTER AND THE GRID

Figure 2.4. The man contemplating the nine muses and man as I
and O (Geoffroy Tory, Champ fleury)

that Pudicity and Chastity above all else are required for those who demand
access and entry into good letters, of which A is the opening and first of all
abecedaria" (fol. xviii v). When the image bars access to the visual field, the
text penetrates it. And as the genitals are effaced, so also are the eyes of the
Vitruvian figure behind the A. Yet, in the medieval scheme that Tory puts
forward, the picture nonetheless gazes at us. The moralized perspective of
the I-O flute had brought a volumetric (or cosmographic) dimension to the
printed letter. It could be said that the A constitutes an angle opening a

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 THE LETTER AND THE GRID 7i

Figure 2.5. The letter A (Geoffrey Tory, Champ fleury)

monocular perspective from the Vitruvian man's "point of view" toward the
viewer, and that the play of gazes correctly underlines the erotic association of
the generative and visual faculties in the allegory that would otherwise erase
them.
The two other letters that shroud and display the penal region, H and K,
add two dissymmetrical—hence productive—elements to the analogy. The H
(Figure 2.6) is compared to an architectural design in which the quadrature of
the letter resembles buildings by "wishing to be erected solidly," with a house
broader than the roof (fol. xix r). The implication is that the analogies of
micro- and macrocosm, as well as letter/body and house/nation, require a
method of gridding to obtain optimum balance. But also, the cruciform fig-
ure, which is at once behind and in front of the H, produces a depth of field in
the configuration: The man's forearms rest in front of each trumeau and his
belly is seen behind the transverse lintel; the organ of generation seems to be a
fulcrum on which die whole is balanced.
The distance that the comparison of the //to the man gains from the com-
parison of the body to classical architecture can be noted through comparison

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72 THE LETTER AND THE GRID

Figure 2.6. The letters H and K (Geoffroy Tory, Champ fleury)

with concurrent Menschenalphabeten, which contort carefully drawn bodies to

conform to the shape of letters (e.g., Peter Flotner's 1534 alphabet, illustrated
in Massin 1973: 72). The evident difference of man and letter endorses the play
of androgeny and sexual difference that Tory has just projected through the
perspectival treatment of the letters /and O. This may be why ^(Figure 2.6) is
a form presented as a totality in briseure, where the line of breakage unites the
form along the central horizontal axis. That the K is a homonym of cas, the
popular term designating the human sex organ, turns the example into a rebus
that further proves the point. The bon mot contained in the letter subtends

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 THE LETTER AND THE GRID 73

an Erasmian program that gathers a community of subjects together through

appeal to both high and low levels of humor.6

A Fourth Allegory: Architecture, Letter, and Nation

The fourth allegory compares the letter to domestic architecture. Its first ele-
ments begin at the end of the third allegory. Here, the comparison brings into
view one of the cartographic dimensions of the Champ fleury. In the margin to
the left of a letter-figure ending the segment on the man in the letter (fol. xix v,
the letter-figure immediately resembling the work of the Rabbi Maurus, illus-
trated in Massin 1973:162—67), there is an indexical note that states, "montees
et degres des Anciens" [stairways and steps of the classics] in order to reach a
topic that in the 15205 was probably defining the differences in national styles
or cultural visions of space and volume.7 The K's angular bars are likened to
the ancients' longitudinal stairwells, which took a straight slope from one floor
to the next. Suddenly, the text is turned into an ideogram that combines a per-
spectival view of the page (as a cruciform body, an abstract symbol, and a cal-
ligram of the Vitruvian man) and an ichnographic rendering of a French eccle-
siastical building. From the former standpoint, the twenty-seven lines of text
are bisected by the line beginning "on va tornant au tour du centre & noyau
de la dictz viz le /, & le O, &t le 5" [we proceed turning about the center and
core of the said stairwell of the /, the O, and the 5], such that the axis and hub
of the house being described also locate the vocables "center and core" at the
center and core of the configuration, /and O seem to be situated at the penile
area below the torso and outstretched arms of the calligram.
Tory is not merely being cute or self-conscious: He places the S in the I-O
to designate a spiral staircase at the center of the architectural ground plan.
As Jean Guillaume has shown (1985: 27), the spiral staircase at the center or
the extremity of French buildings at the end of the flamboyant age (as at
Chateauroux) stands as the consummate expression of a French design. The
spiral staircase, he adds, in fact disappears from architectural idiolect at the
very moment it reaches its greatest refinement. Could we be wrong in deduc-
ing that Tory is advancing a late-medieval, specifically French domestic plan of
building in the very place where he discourses on the classical and synchro-
nously imported Italian type of linear, or perspectival, stairway? Our brief
excursion into architecture seems to confirm that he makes a case for recent
French styles of manuscript and print just as he extols the "national" aspect of
the late flamboyant mode that pertains both to domestic and ecclesiastical
buildings.8

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74 THE LETTER AND THE GRID

Figure 2.7. An enigma: a cruciform ideogram (Geoffrey Tory,

Champ fleury)

For the same reason, the identity of text and image, a dedifferentiated space
where the unconscious motivations of die work are located, hinges on a
paraph that is the cornerstone of the textual ideogram in the form of a ground
plan for an ecclesiastical building. To see how, we can consider the figure as a
function of the flamboyant style in domestic architecture. The calligrammatic
figure resembles not a Gothic structure but, initially, a Romanesque structure:
The transepts are extended as arms, whereas thirteenth century Ile-de-France
buildings trimmed the collateral members, the arms of the body of the
church, in favor of a compact whole with a polygonal apse at its eastern head;
the east end (or the top of the page) is flat, not prismatically polygonal; the
west end opens wide as if it were a narthex, the extension to the church that
High Gothic had long since eliminated (Figure 2.7).
Why the seeming return to the older style? It may be because, first, Tory
suggests that the origins of the Frenchness of Gothic and classical letters can
be seen in Carolingian and Romanesque forms, in the works of scriptoria,

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 THE LETTER AND THE GRID 75

which have an influence on the style of letters he is setting forward. Second, he

implies that the spiral form that is at the axis of the diagram shares much with
the flamboyant architectural style, an extensive idiom that defined itself in
a dialectical relation with the Gothic by extending the transept, reviving the
narthex, and flattening the east end, or the apse, of the church. That style goes
hand in hand with his rehabilitation of the cursive forms that others had
wished to reject (Saenger 1977: 499). A great French history of architectural
space and of writing style appears to be extended into the diagram.
The homage to earlier and to recent types of letters and building programs
is evident in the "signifier of demarcation" (Rosolato 1985: 63—82) that is set
between the fixture of which it is a part and the domestic building that it
heralds on the next folio. Tory has stated that the reader can see "between our
letters" th'e signification of another design of stairwell and of steps, which are
spirally placed, in such a way that the /, a central shaft, is set in an O, the
containing cylinder. The S curves between the center and the circumference,
"laquelle chose porra estre moult bien consideree, & entendue facillement par
la figure qui s'ensuyt" [which is very worthy of attention, and can be under-
stood by the figure that follows] (fol. xix v). What follows is an upper-case S
that turns s'ensuyt, what follows, into the proof of what precedes, and vice
versa. The very letter that is said to follow reappears in upper case at the origi-
nary angle or edge of the next page, prior to the diagram.9
This effect of trickery, of embedded images, riddles, or hidden agendas in
the texture of the writing, in which the shape of the final word of the calligram
and the first letter of the next paragraph translate each other into the figure of
a spiral shape and the sibilance of an S into a vocable and a rebus, shows how
a double reading also operates in the adjacent figure of the house of letters
(Figure 2.8, top). Tory furnishes two diagrams at once. In the rectangle, he
draws a house that is based on the classical font of the Attic capitals. The A is
the slope of the roof, the H the sign of the two-level elevation, the K the
extension of the same but also a classical stairway going from die ground floor
to the second floor and attic, and the O-I-S constitutes the "French" solution
to what Kis offering. The parallelogram defining the outer area of the roof is
so vertically sloped that a viewer sees a French, flamboyant domestic building
but not a Roman basilica. The illustration conjoins the two styles to show that
the French mode contains the classical past. A national program depending on
fifteenth-century models at the cusp of "old" and "new" building programs
(undertaken by Francis I in 1517) is visible. Tory retains elements of the "old"
Gothic style—the French idiom—as the "new" design in both the angle of the

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76 THE LETTER AND THE GRID

Figure 2.8. The house of letters, the textual L, and the cardinal I
(Geoffroy Tory, Champ fleury)

roof and the allegory of the spiral staircase. The flamboyant style is seen as co-
extensive with the classical idiom. What follows,
C
OI on deman-
doit plates
formes en nos
dictes lettres At-
tiques, on y en
trouvera asses
pour galeries,

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 THE LETTER AND THE GRID 77

begins with a heraldic S, two and one-half times as large as the typeface, an
upper-case /, and a lower-case o, leaving

Slo
in descending order, in a line that gives perspective to the three components of
the spiral staircase that are illustrated in the house below and to the right. The
writing already embodies what it sets out to describe, thus conflating discourse
and referent, tenor and vehicle, signifier and signified, and even cause and effect.

Betrayals of Diagram and Text

The second reading of the diagram is confirmed in the text itself, in areas
where the text does not explain what abuts it to the right (lines 1—21) and what
is above it (lines 22-31). Tory usually proceeds emblematically by placing an
explanation just above ("la quelle chose iay cy faict en figure et desseing") or
below ("La lettre . . . cy pres designee en son Quarre") an illustration. The an-
nounced allegory of the house of letters is, however, deferred. In its place he
inserts a note on the difference in the naming of French and Roman buildings
in France. In the French vernacular, classical theaters are called "arenas," which
suggests that two kinds of nomenclature are also embedded in the unglossed
image.10 In place of a commentary in subscription, we read, first, a mapping
of the letter. Tory endows the alphabetic unit with distinct cardinal traits that
probably derive from the unmentioned analogy with the placement of High
Gothic churches, which orient the apse eastward, toward the Holy Land. Now
the four sides of the body of the letter are compassed, or endowed with cardi-
nal directions. The point where the diagonals of the square meet is akin to the
point where humanity finds itself in the world, and where a person can gain a
sense of direction merely by contemplating the form of a letter.
The architectural metaphor enables Tory to develop a cosmography of writ-
ing. As a gallery, the /should face north or east. As a shape of a room, its long
bar should face north, and its "paw" (patte) should look to the east,
qui est la situation la plus sayne de toutes, a cause du diet dos quon tourne au
Vent meridian, qui est pestilent tant aux corps humains que aux corps materielz
& inanimez, & a cause de la face longue qui recoit en elle le Vent de Byze qui est
pur, nect, & agile, & a cause de la face courte qui est au dedans de la patte de la
dicte lettre L, en laquelle le beau soleil levant regarde incontinent au point du
jour, & y dure en y inspirant toute suavite, pour la plupart dudict jour.

[which is the healthiest site of all, because the said back is turned to the south
wind, which is as pestilent to humans as it is to material and inanimate bodies,
and because of the long side that receives in its form the north wind, which is

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78 THE LETTER AND THE GRID

pure, clean, and agile, and because of the short side that is inside the paw of the
said letter L, upon which the handsome rising sun freely gazes at daybreak, and
stays there, inspiring great sweetness throughout most of the said day] (fol. xx r)

The environmental aspect of Tory s architecture is clearly inspired by Vitruvius

and Albert!, as he duly notes, but the innovation on the page is the graphic
block of text that suggests that the book can also be marked with cardinal
traits. The book as a spatial symbol, or compass, pertains to a Latin tradition
in the Middle Ages (Curtius 1963: 302-47), but it now gains new meaning in
that man is at the ostensive center of a letter seen as a compass in microcosm,
and in that the page conveying the image of the house faces south, toward the
book's gutter (and hence toward pestilence, as Ptolemaic wind maps had
shown in their lower corners); north to the margin on the right, what Molinet
had recently called the "border" or lisiere of meaning; west to material above,
or to the top of the page; and east to the bottom edge, or to things below. Be-
cause the four points are correlated to the square of the page, it is also implied
that the book itself has other coordinates diat relate to the cosmos. The spine
would point in one direction, the vellum cover in another, the colophon in the
opposite direction, and so on. The cardinal volume of the book is engaged
when Tory "cubes" his diagram of the man in the letter in order to make his
edifice resemble what Plato's Timaeus had equated with the world. In Plato's
work, the cube was likened to the earth, and here the same analogy is offered.
As Tory's discourse is always duplicitous, so, too, is the schematic design
that moves in the directions of surface and volume. When folios xx vi-xxi r are
scanned, the cardinal directions that were coordinated with the winds and the
path of the sun for the placement of buildings are projected onto a moralized
space that replaces the compass points with the four virtues of Justice, Pru-
dence, Force, and Temperance. The inherited significance of their names is less
important than are their positions as figures of geometric calculation and, it is
implied, of navigation. Justice observes height and width; Prudence manages
the ruler and the geometer's compass; Force divides, measures, and appor-
tions; Temperance masters the art of spacing and placement. The face "con-
tained" by the personified corners of the square is an implicit map that can be
surveyed (Tory remarking that the "eyeline" is to be taken literally, as an equa-
tor that cuts between two pupils).
In the context of Tory's incipient and totalizing history of French language
and letters, the figure contained in the square would be an ideal subject of Le
Roy tres Catholique, Francis I. By way of Ovid, Tory describes his man as he
who "ought to dominate over all ... created things" except for the universal

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 THE LETTER AND THE GRID 79

creator. That a man can fit in the square area, and that his face fits the oval in-
terior of the O, or that his seven orifices match the number of the liberal arts is
only an epiphenomenal—patently Ficinian—praise of human beauty. In the
greater context of state and nation, the comparison has at least three goals: It
first suggests that a subject can be serialized according to Euclidean terms,
hence regulated or replicated as an autonomous and infinitely reproducible
form from a master-patron. What is wrought in the figure of the man-as-letter-
as-grid-as-printed-diagram has decisive political implications for administra-
tive officials who care to think through the elements of Tory's analogy. The
gridding of space, body, and book can be correlated to produce a national
body ascribed to an expansive space in which it is said to belong and to have a
proper place, all the while the nude figure is dressed in the pious garb of
Christian and humanist values.
The second goal, which seems to aim at what Descartes will make with his
automata a century later, involves an extensive lettering of the body. By being
named in terms of places, parts, figures, and seats of virtue, the body is
mapped. Tory uses the same effects of nomenclature to link the body to space
and serial reproduction in cartographic terms. His subject is ciphered, but it is
also accompanied by a gazetteer that associates its notable places with figures
of the arts and of the Greek sciences. The "lettered man" is rigged so that he is
both explicated and determined according to alphabetic codes, and he is made
to resemble a muscular puppet that can be operated by whoever can push and
pull the letters of the alphabet (Figure 2.9).
The third goal undermines the first two and again shows how the trickster
sabotages his most hermetic and symmetrical allegories. No sooner does the
author put his man's face in the majuscule O, for the sake of the initial para-
digm of the perfection of/and O, than he is obliged to bisect the circle with a
vertical bar. But the shape reminds him of the Greek phi, and leads him to-
ward jokes and rebuses that he is at first seduced into mentioning but that he
then, in a return of reason, rejects.
Les Grecs de ces deux lettres I. & O. ainsi loge'es 1'une sus 1'autre comme les
voyez en la dicte figure, ont faict une autre lettre quilz appellent Phi. (L)a quelle
Phi. vault autant ung P. & une aspiration, & laquelle Ilz ont en usage en lieu de
E, qui n'ont pas entre leurs lettres. II semble que nostre ditte figure soit ung
Resbus & chose Hierogliphique, & que ie 1'aye faicte pour faire resuer & muser
les musards, mais tout bien considere, non est.

[The Greek form of these two letters I and O lodged thus one over the other as
you see in the said figure, is made with another letter that they call phi, which
amounts to a P and an aspiration, and which they use in place of F, a letter that

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8o THE LETTER AND THE GRID

Figure 2.9. The lettered man, or "Ihomme letre" (Geoffroy Tory,

Champ fleury)

they do not have in their alphabet. It seems that our said figure may be a rebus
and a hieroglyph, and that I have drawn it to inspire revery and to lead mus-
ing souls by the nose, but when everything is considered, that is not the case.]
(fol. xxii r)

In going from phi to F, the reader follows the history of writing from the
Greeks to the French. Each tradition is contemporary with the other in the gist
of the sentence. But when the "said figure" is literally spoken, Tory is obliged to
name the components of its vocal effect, "ung P. & une aspiration."

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 THE LETTER AND THE GRID 81

All of sudden, he abuts the unconscious that refuses to accept all of the lim-
iting and controlling apparatuses that comprise the two goals noted above: A
P (a. pet or a fart) and an aspiration (a good noseful of stench) mock the nobil-
ity of the Greek letter. The pun is too good for Tory to overlook in passing,
hence the logic of denial that follows a Freudian psychopathology to the spirit
(and explosive force) of the "essentially localized structure of the signifier." All
the humanist "aspirations" that are elsewhere being extolled now collapse in
the differential mechanism of the letter as a self-contained world and rebus
and as a unit set in a spoken discourse. Betrayed are the cliches that are the
basis of the first two goals:
The /, which is a straight perpendicular line, placed thus between the two eyes,
tells us that we must have our faces raised toward the sky in order to recognize
our creator, and to contemplate the great gifts and sciences that he bestows upon
us. And it may be true that God wishes us to aim our contemplation toward the
heavens, as he gives us our head raised upward, and that of beasts lowered down-
ward, (fol. xxi r)

Idealism of this kind is reduced to hilarious absurdity within the logic of Tory's
method.
The disruptive element—marked as intended in the author's disavowal,
which draws attention to his wit—carries over to the "lettered man" as mari-
onette. As a perfect figure, both a 10, as in IO, and a 23, a prime number, the
number of letters in the alphabet, which is the sum of nine (muses) + seven
(liberal arts) + four (cardinal virtues) + three (graces), the figure of the man is
a "house" (logis) of letters and of the muses and other personifications of virtue
and science. P, for Terpsichore, is at the mouth, suggesting that the world is in-
deed both right side up and upside down. Q (a common pun and rebus on
cul) stands for Euterpe and is shafted into the man's anus, where die letter be-
comes the thing itself by virtue of its placement in the right spot, "le lieu pour
descharger le ventre." X, the axial letter, likewise happens to be at the navel.
Tory hints that his motivation of the places by means of letters and names is,
paradoxically, both arbitrarily motivated and motivatedly arbitrary. He has
forsaken alphabetic logic ("tout a mon escient" that is, conscientiously) to
show that "their nature and virtue strive to be mixed one within the other," or
that the system of mapping at the basis of his allegorical reasoning mixes con-
ventional signs with an artful design of his own signature.

A Well-Joined Marquetry-
Evidence of the author as trickster is nowhere more apparent. His wit is shown
in an idiom that combines anamorphic projection, the art of perspective, and

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82 THE LETTER AND THE GRID

the artisan craft dedicated to the intarsia. He chooses as the emblem of his
book a marquetry and a mosaic. These are not just what he draws from Latin
to describe his process (an "opus vermiculatum, opus tessellatum, & assaro-
tum") or the flowered garden in spring ("la beaulte d'un pre & iardin est en la
diversite & multitude assemblee de diverses belles herbes & fleurs" [the beauty
of a field and a garden is in the assembled diversity and multitude of diversely
handsome grasses and flowers] (fol. xxiii r), but also experiments in readings of
three-dimensional figures on a flat plane. The marquetry refers specifically to
the intarsia, cleverly inlaid woodcarvings that give die illusion of polygonal
forms floating in a world of depth on a flat panel of wood.11
The figure of the garden as a marquetry reflects the title of the book,
Champ fleury, but it also sums up the architectural component of the prevail-
ing allegories in the second book. As in many writings of the early years of
French humanism, the four components are tessellated, or "vermiculated," in
the verbal style diat describes the marquetry garden. The rest of the second
book weaves the twenty-three letters, virtues, sciences, graces, and arts into al-
legories of the Homeric chain: a letter /, raised from the earth to the sky, that
ties the earth to the heavens; the Virgilian branches of golden science and of
ignorance that bear or shed die twenty-three leaves standing for the letters of
the alphabet; the allegorized O as the Homeric chain wrought in a circle of the
same number of links; a triumphal entry of Apollo that resembles those that
the French king had known after his accession to the throne; a flaming fleur-
de-lis made from Tory's /and A. All glorify dedication to and study of letters.
They also convey a growing sense of the author's affiliation with the cartog-
rapher's identity as an artisan and a scientist who, by dint of discipline and
meticulous labor, will become an autonomous subject of the nation repre-
sented by the vernacular idiom.
As he does elsewhere, Tory congratulates himself for the wit of his four
moralized illustrations. It is the Homeric ladder, however (Figure 2.10) that
spells out his relation to the cosmographer and the self-contained subject.
Where Tory refers to Homer, he could also be referring to Giovanni Pico della
Mirandola, whose famous ladder granted to the new individual, the self-made
person, the means either to climb—aspire—to the heavens or to descend to
the lower depths. The typographer wishes to take his reader skyward, but in a
way that has been cleared by his own investment and self-realization in the
work before our eyes. For this reason, we can hypothesize that Tory inau-
gurated the second book in cooperation with Charles de Bovelles (Carolus
Bovillus) (fol. xi r), the French interpreter of Euclid. He had arranged the four
elements according to a quasi-periodic scale of chemical and human activity.

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 THE LETTER AND THE GRID 83

Figure 2.10. The Homeric ladder-I between earth and sky

(Geoffroy Tory, Champ fleury)

The rungs of his paradigmatic ladder went from essere, the earth, to vivere, or
water; from there to sentire, or air; and, finally, to intelligere, the empyreal rim
of fire. When Bovelles "makes the heavenly out of the earthly man, the actual
out of the political man, intellect out of nature, the wise man is imitating
Prometheus, who arose to take from the Gods the all-illuminating force,"
which ultimately means that the human can become his "own master creator"
who "acquires and possesses himself" (Cassirer 1979: 96). The itinerary is
cosmographic insofar as it will be equated, in Oronce Fine's drawings in the
Protomathesis (1532) and in his edition of Bovelles's geometry (1542), with ex-
perience and with a vertical movement from the center of the Ptolemaic uni-
verse to the outer reaches of the firmament. That same cosmography of self-
making is contained in silence, in secret (or as Tory would say, en segref), in
Tory's remarkable, flamboyant O that broadcasts the music of Apollo through
the fiery letters that burn on the rungs of the ladder turned into the shape of
the serpent of time (Figure 2.11). Tory may state that his musician is Apollo,
but since the typographer is a trickster, he also refers to himself as a new
Prometheus.

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84 THE LETTER AND THE GRID

Figure 2.11. A "tresbelle conclusion": Apollo in the flaming O (Geoffroy

Tory, Champ fleury)

The mention of Charles de Bovelles at the beginning of the second book

is a key to another, alternate designation of the central figure of the god play-
ing the harp in the final illustration, and this connection tells how the map-
ping impulse pertains to self-realization elsewhere in the book. We witness
a desire to center oneself in order to disappear into the core of the material
vision of letters. The presence of a selfless persona becomes equivalent to
Bovelles's self-actualization in the graphic design of the Champ fleury, in its
gridded form at the level of a totality found in each and every one of its in-
dividual units.

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 THE LETTER AND THE GRID 85

Figure 2.11. Grids for the background and body of the letter (Geoffroy Tory, Champ
fleury)

A Cartography of the Letter

The proof of Tory's protocartographic sensibility, evinced in its most limpid
form, without allegorical festoons, is located in the prefatory material to the
third book. On folio xxxiii r (Figure 2.12), Tory illustrates the method he uses
for drawing his letters. He inscribes a cross by marking first a perpendicular
meridian and then its horizontal transversal, a line "diametrale & traversante
equilibree, pour nous donner bon heur & commencement a entrer en noz
lettres, & pour aider a les designer comme y leur est requis selon Reigle &
Compas" [diametric and equilibrated crossing, to provide us with a felicitous
beginning and entry into our letters, and to assist us in designing them as they
require with a ruler and a compass] (fol. xxxii v).12 Then a square is drawn
about the equilateral cross. Five units of space are marked off above and below
and to the left and to the right of each axis. A grid is filled in, with the result
that eleven lines (5 + 1 + 5) are evident on each side of the square. The process
is illustrated in the two contiguous squares: From the "cross of the perpen-
dicular and equilibrated lines traversing the equiangular" to the left to the
"arena and experimental place for making Attic letters in measure and num-
ber" on the right, we move from geometry to allegory, or to the site where the

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86 THE LETTER AND THE GRID

self's scaffold is created. Tory explains that the X at the axis of the graduated
grid is the site of the "arena" where the essay, the exercise, or even the military
operation (place exercitative, the arena, recalling the Latin exercitus with its
military trappings) takes place. It is at the median point of one hundred pixels.
Every letter must be generated from the same relation of the center to the
equipollent configuration in general:
Quant vous viendra a plaisir vouloir faire lettre Attique, debvez avant toute
chose, constituer ung Quarre selon la haulteur que la pretendez faire, puis y
signer une croix au mylieu, & consequemment les aultres lignes tant d'ung coste
que d'aultre en equidistante mesure, en sorte que le diet Quarre soit esgallement
divise.

[When you will have the pleasure of making classical letters, above all else you
will have to establish a square according to the height that you wish, then mark a
cross in the middle, and then the other lines, as much from one side as from the
other in an equal measure, so that the aforesaid square will be equally divided.]
(fol. xxxii r)

As we have seen, die second book is set in place like the X in the grid of the
surrounding material. A similar method of arbitrarily designating a motivated
site, an X, also holds for the Ptolemaic system of topographical mapping that
Tory's contemporaries, Pieter Apian and Oronce Fine, put forward in their
practical manuals of mapping. Apian drew his map of Bavaria in a fashion re-
sembling Tory's method in his 1523 Cosmograpkicus Liber, which was published
in twenty-nine editions over the next eighty-nine years (Karrow 1993: 53). In
1532, Oronce Fine theorized the composition of a map of France diat was also
based on the designation of an axis, except diat the square was shifted into a
trapezoid in order to account for the rotundity of the earth's surface (see chap-
ter 4). In each case, the common ground of cosmography, the drawing of
letters, and the objective placement of a "self" at a crossing of a meridian and
a median latitude are visible bodi in the printshop and on the cartographer's
drawing table. The same method will hold for textual ensembles that grid
their relations between the signature and the body of writing that follows or
that are aimed at the author's secret mark. Printed writing becomes a function
of spatial coordination and of perspectival drawing.
In order to see some of the consequences of the new relation between car-
tography and printed literature, we should now turn to Tory's two contempo-
raries, Rabelais and Fine. Before following Pantagruel's itinerary, we might
wish to sum up the impact of Tory's work on cartographic writing. He com-
poses a book that is a language map of French, codified according to the
twenty-three letters of the alphabet and the nomenclature of other, earlier

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 THE LETTER AND THE GRID 87

manuscript and typographic forms. These comprise a "flowered field" of what

he underscores as a specifically French creation, whose roots are embedded
more deeply in ancient Greece than in the world of Latin letters. The Greco-
French mythography, which Jean Lemaire had recently mapped in his Illustra-
tions de Gaule etsingularitez de Troie (1511), serves to nationalize French objects
to the degree that they mediate between local dialects, a great past, and a
prescriptive model of the vernacular that is being heralded in Tory's own dis-
course. Like future maps, a national style of print, a standardized form that
accounts for the historical variety of writing, gives coherence to French verbal
geography. The style and explanation of the square-based letter argue for a
particular history that would be, Tory hints, useful for military and political
operations. At the same time, however, there emerges a literary persona that
destabilizes programmatic issues by virtue of a system of inscription and spac-
ing that runs contrary to the ideas being advocated. This intermediate area of
play allows the author to contend with or to move about what would other-
wise be an increasingly fixed or fixating space defined by perspectival grids.
This persona becomes the other—the space, place, and person of alterity—
who resides in and inspires the writer as a prototypical cartographer.

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