olga shpilko
Dissertation submitted in partial fulillment of the requirements for the University of Reading, 2012
A geometrical approach to letter design:
Renaissance and Modernism
11,682 words
Many thanks to my supervisor James Mosley, to Daria Safonova and Pio De Rose for their help in translation from the old Italian.
a geometrical approach to letter design :
renaissance and modernism
A geometrical approach to letter design has almost always been a
marginal phenomenon, and its development has never been smooth.
However, in the history of letterforms, there were periods when
this approach engaged in competition with the established tradition
of shaping letters according to calligraphic writing. These sudden
inluxes of interest in geometrical letter design seem to have never
been explored in their relationship, although with further study it is
evident that they have common origins and sources. This thesis aims
to draw a line between the letterforms from two periods when geometry became a dominant concept: the Renaissance and Modernism.
These periods are separated by almost half a millennium, and the letterforms from these periods are therefore so distant from each other,
that, actually, do not invite to a comparison. That is why the irst part
of the work is written in a defensive tone and stands as a preventive
reply to those statements, which might be put forward to contest
the sustainability of this thesis. The second part provides arguments
in support of the hypothesis. It discusses causes that might have
facilitated the rapid progress of the geometrical approach, and consequences that manifested themselves in the characteristic features
of the letterforms and principles of their construction. The interest in
geometry within typographic practice is put into the socio–historical
context of both epochs, and is treated as strongly dependent on it.
2
Contents
Abstract
2
Introduction
4
In defense of the thesis
6
9
1.1 Common denominator
1.2 Visual disparateness
In proof of the thesis
2.1
2.2
2.3
Simpliication and reduction
Social and cultural contexts
On Romain du roi
11
19
24
Conclusion
30
Bibliography
32
Imagery sources
35
3
Introduction
1 Gray, Nicolete. A history of lettering:
creative experiment and letter identity.
Oxford: Phaidon, 1986, p. 122.
2 Cresci, Giovan Francesco. Essemplare di
piv sorti lettere. London: Nattali & Maurice
Ltd., 1968, p. 42.
3 Mosley, James. Giovan Francesco Cresci
and the baroque letter in Rome. In: Stiff,
Paul, ed. Typography Papers 6, London:
Hyphen Press, 2005, p. 116.
4 Carter, Matthew. Theories of letterform
construction, part 1. In: Printing History,
1991/2, vol. 13 – 14, p. 4.
5 Carter, ref. 4, p. 7.
6 Feliciano, Felice. Alphabetum Romanum.
Verona: Editiones Oficinae Bodoni, 1960,
p. 128.
7 Burke, Christopher. Paul Renner: the art of
typography. London: Hyphen Press: 1998,
p. 100.
The two most signiicant fonts for today, roman and italic, originated
from the scripts, or handwritten letters, by Poggio Bracciolini and
Niccolò Niccoli.1 Since then, the art of letter design has been inseparably connected with the art of calligraphy. However, as printing
spread around Europe, a parallel way of making letterforms has been
practiced. Faces have been not drawn, but constructed.
A geometrical, or rational, approach to type design emerged in
the Renaissance. It was linked to the revival of ancient letters, and
the irst revived alphabet was the one by Felice Feliciano (c.1460).
The majority of artists then agreed that geometry was a basis upon
which classic inscriptions were made. As opposed to them, Giovan
Francesco Cresci avowed that letters should be drawn freehand. In
Essemplare di piv sorti lettere (1560), he said that when geometrically constructed letters were compared ‘with the true antique Majuscules’, they tended to be ‘confused and lack all proportions and grace
by contrast’.2 However, Cresci’s voice was mufled by the numerous
adherents of the geometrical approach applied to the Roman capitals.
Even those who were considered as Cresci’s pupils, ‘almost invariably provided geometrical rules for making them’.3 To do justice to
Cresci’s concept, even among the artists advocating geometrical construction of letters, there were quite a few who also sometimes preferred to rely on an eye and hand rather than on a compass or rule.
Matthew Carter noticed this while examining Luca Pacioli’s letters,
and concluded that ‘to attack his letters with rule and compass—or
mouse—is to learn that Pacioli interpreted his rules to humour his
eye, and that this is necessary in order to recapture his letter and its
spirit’.4 Carter also named Dürer: at some point he had to advise to
lay the compass aside. Instructing readers on the letter O, he said that
‘with your hand you must shape the slender outline of the letter to a
juster proportion’.5 Feliciano also should be mentioned within this
row. Discussing the letter R, he had to admit that its tail, the most
dificult part, ‘cannot be perfectly described with the compass’,6 and
that one should be guided by his eye.
From the later period, Paul Renner said that ‘the artistic value
of a typeface has only to prove itself before the human eye; that is,
in the sphere of appearances and not the sphere of mathematical
concepts’.7 Still, a geometrical approach was a major concept in the
ifteenth and sixteenth centuries, although not fully implemented in
practice, but advocated vigorously as if no inconsistencies were permitted. But as the Renaissance was succeeded by the Modern times,
this approach almost fell into abeyance. Another wave of interest in
geometric forms within letterforms fell at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is obvious that, for example, Tschichold’s letterforms
far from resemble those of Pacioli. However, I believe there is an
4
8 Before he started thinking that ‘identical
formation of individual, unrelated elements
in geometrically constructed letterforms decreases in a dangerous way the individuality
and clarity of the letters and thereby the
legibility of the whole’. (Burke, Christopher. Active literature: Jan Tschichold and
New Typography. London: Hyphen Press,
2007, p. 196).
intrinsic afinity between these experiments in the Renaissance and
Modernist letter design, which I would like to examine and reveal in
my thesis.
To justify that, I would like to provide arguments that most indicate this afinity. In my research, I have appealed to direct sources
(like the facsimiles of the alphabets or specimens, texts of the
treatises or essays), as well as to indirect sources. I found it useful
to place geometrical experiments from both sides of the Renaissance
and Modernism into the general social and cultural context. Thus, for
instance, while talking about the Modernist works it seemed impossible to ignore the overall practice of the most inluential Modernist
school, the Bauhaus. That is why the name of Oskar Schlemmer, not
a typographer but a participant of the school, will go along with the
names of Herbert Bayer, who was preoccupied with the invention of
the universal alphabet, and Joost Schmidt. Since it is impossible to
embrace all examples of geometrical construction of letters, I tried
to restrict myself to approximately equal quantities of names within
each epoch, although, obviously, the range of choice that Modernism
provides is incomparably larger. In relation to the twentieth century geometrically constructed letterforms, apart from Schmidt and
Bayer, also works by Paul Renner, Jan Tschichold,8 Kurt Schwitters,
Cassandre will be discussed. On the part of the Renaissance, there
will be analysed works by Felice Feliciano, Damianus Moyllus, Luca
Pacioli, Giovam Baptista Verini, Geofroy Tory, Francesco Torniello
da Novara, and some others.
5
In defense of the thesis
At irst sight this hypothesis may seem controversial, and I agree
that it would be hasty to make a direct link between the Renaissance
and Modernist letterforms only on the basis of the shared principle
of geometrical construction. The relationship between these forms
is more complicated, and at the same time also seems more deeply
rooted in the sources and origins of the alphabets rather than simply
in their external geometrical kinship. To start with, I would like to
brush aside those arguments, which one may give against my attempt
to compare the faces from such different epochs as the Renaissance
and Modernism.
1.1
ig. 1 Tory’s letter A represents a
Compass and a Rule.
9 Ciapponi, Lucia A. A fragmentary treatise
on epigraphic alphabets by Fra Giocondo da
Verona. In: Renaissance Quarterly, 1979,
vol. 32, no. 1, p. 24.
10 Feliciano, ref. 6, p. 36.
11 Tory, Geofroy. Champ leury. New York:
Dover Publications, Inc., 1967, p. 85.
12 Holliday, Peter. Eric Gill’s photograph
album ‘Rome 1906’. In: Holliday, Peter,
ed. Eric Gill in Ditchling: four essays. New
Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 2002,
p. 1.
13 Holliday, ref. 12, p. 7.
14 Burke, Christopher. Active literature: Jan
Tschichold and New Typography. London:
Hyphen Press, 2007, p. 178.
15 Burke, ref. 7, pp. 95 – 96.
common denominator
In both times, these were ancient Roman letters that were usually
meant to be a model for the artists. In the Renaissance, the revival
of the classic letterforms went along with a general rediscovery of
Antiquity. Fra Giocondo da Verona carefully looked at and read the
ancient inscriptions while preparing to form his alphabet.9 Felice
Feliciano, Antiquarius as he named himself, admitted in his book
Alphabetum Romanum that he thoroughly studied classic inscriptions on marble slabs in Rome and other places, and the proportions
of his letters ‘are precisely those of the classic Roman inscription letters’.10 The same is true for Geofroy Tory. In his Champ leury (1529)
he always referred to ‘the wise Ancients’, who, as he believed, made
the irst of their letters represent a Compass and a Rule (ig. 1).11
Damian Moyllus, Giovam Batista Verini, Luca Pacioli, all of them
appealed to the classical Roman period.
Surprisingly, the Modernists also looked back at classic inscriptions. Eric Gill during his trip to Rome at Easter 1906 had made
several drawings on the construction of the Roman alphabet.12 His
letters, just as in the case of the Renaissance drawings, were supported by the construction lines, measurement marks and indications of where the compass leg should be placed. Edward Johnston,
a typographer and Gill’s admired teacher, taught ‘‘the essential or
structural forms’ of the Roman inscriptions as a basis for contemporary lettering’.13 Jan Tschichold also stated that the forms of the
Roman capitals ‘live in us as a model’, and ‘offered his ‘Block–
script’ version as the ‘skeleton form of the ancient Roman script’.14
Paul Renner admitted that his starting point for the design of Futura
was ‘to use the forms of classical, Roman inscriptional majuscules
as a basis for the capitals’.15 Then, he adapted the design of the lower
case to the forms of the upper case. Finally, there is an example of a
direct reference to classic Roman inscriptions by Peter Behrens. The
sans serif lettering on the façade of the truly Modernist building
of Turbinenfabrik (Turbine Factory) was considered by Behrens as
6
16 Burke, Chris. Peter Behrens and the
German letter: type design and architectural
lettering. In: Journal of Design History,
1992, vol. 5, no. 1, p. 29.
17 Evetts, L. C. Roman lettering: a study of
the letters of the inscription at the base of
the Trajan column, with an outline of the
history of lettering in Britain. London: Sir
Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1960, p. 12.
18 Carter, ref. 4.
19 Evetts, ref. 17.
20 See below on this point.
21 Torniello, Francesco. The alphabet of
Francesco Torniello da Novara. Followed
by a comparison with the alphabet of Fra
Luca Pacioli. Verona: Editiones Oficinae
Bodoni, 1971, p. xviii.
22 Grasby, Richard D. Processes in the making
of Roman inscriptions: introduction to the
studies. Oxford: The Centre for the Study of
Ancient Documents, 2009, p. 2.
23 Feliciano, ref. 6, p. 125.
‘modernized, or at least simpliied, antique forms’.16
However, there was one Roman inscription, which distinctively
stood out among the others—an inscription on the Trajan column.
The column was erected in Rome in the year ad 11417 to commemorate the victory in the Dacian Wars under a Roman emperor Trajan,
and its lettering has been commonly accepted ‘as the canon of orthodoxy’.18
There are six rows of lettering in the Trajan inscription, and the
size of the letters diminishes towards the base of the inscription.
This decrease was justiied by the fact that the letters were placed
above the eye–level. Therefore, it made the lettering ‘appear of
uniform height from the observer’s point of view’.19 This can serve as
circumstantial proof that the ancients were aware of the basic principles of perspective. So, they should have been aware of the basic
principles of geometry, too.
Indeed, geometrical forms were discovered in Roman inscriptions.20 Whether inscriptions were initially constructed geometrically
is a disputable issue. Giovanni Mardersteig in his introduction to
The alphabet of Francesco Torniello da Novara (1517) made an
interesting observation. He said that ‘when a style of architecture or
any other form of artistic creation has reached a deinitive stage in
rules and proportions, geometric laws are drawn up to it the construction which has already taken shape’.21 He had traced the same
development in Greek and Roman capitals. In any case, by the time
the model Trajan inscription came into being, this stage was already
behind. Regardless of how the inscription was made, it showed a certain pattern of forms, which was quite easy to follow and therefore to
reproduce. Richard D. Grasby stated that a regulated system of letter
design was established already two hundred years before Trajan:
‘Constructed capitals in the style scriptura monumentalis, wherever
they are found, reveal a remarkable consistency of proportion and
letter outline. With their unit values of width and height secured
by measurement, it is possible to predict the forms of letters which
are missing from a fragmentary inscription but are necessary to its
epigraphic restoration’.22
This suggests a signiicant deduction: Roman inscriptions, and
hence the letterforms, which the Renaissance artists derived from
them, having certain regularity in their construction, are much closer
to printed letters than the calligraphic exercises of the early Renaissance masters. Such letters can be reproduced with a fairly high level
of precision, which would be almost impossible had they not supporting grids or certain rules of construction. The only thing the Renaissance artists permitted themselves was to offer several versions
of the same letter. For instance, Feliciano made two drawings of the
letter D, explaining that it ‘may be made, as you wish, in two ways’,23
and of the letter R. Pacioli showed two letter Os, saying that ‘you can
7
24 Morison, Stanley. Fra Luca de Pacioli of
Borgo S Sepolcro. New York: Kraus Reprint
Co., 1969, p. 57.
25 Carter, ref. 5.
26 Tory, ref. 11.
27 Further called Luminario for the sake of
brevity.
28 Carter, Sebastian. The Morison years and
beyond: 1923 – 1965. In: Boag, A.
and L. Wallis, eds. One hundred years of
type making: 1897 – 1997. The Monotype
Recorder, 1997, no. 10, p. 19.
29 Bayer, Herbert. Herbert Bayer: painter,
designer, architect. New York: Reinhold
Publishing Corporation; London: Studio
Vista, 1967, p. 42.
ig. 2 Tory’s reversed letter A.
take which you like’.24 But, interestingly, the same occurred later in
the twentieth century, and Paul Renner in his original drawings for
Futura showed several versions of the letters a, r, and g. However,
any variations were prescribed in the treatises or specimens and no
further digression was possible. This resolves quite a big issue, which
might prevent from the comparison of the alphabets born in the Renaissance and machine–driven Modernism: there is a fundamental
difference in the purpose of use of the alphabets from the different
periods of time.
Indeed, the very irst treatise on the geometrical construction
of letters was written by Felice Feliciano in the early 1460s, when
printing had not yet reached Italy. Later, the Renaissance alphabets
also were not considered as typefaces. They were large in size and
aimed at stone–cutters rather than at printers. ‘There is no evidence
that Feliciano, Moyllus, or Pacioli aimed their lettering treatises at
typefounders; their capitals were for painting or cutting at monumental sizes or, better still, admiring in the abstract’,25 said Matthew
Carter. Only one alphabet, by Geofroy Tory, was deinitely meant
to be turned into punches. In Champ leury the author provided a
special drawing of a reversed letter A (ig. 2) and explained: ‘Before
the printed letter is complete it is made twice reversed & twice right.
It is reversed the irst time in the steel punches, in which the letter is
to the left; the matrices have the letter right; the letter of cast metal
is, like the said punches, reversed. And, lastly, on the printed page,
the letter appears in the right position, and in the aspect requisite for
reading currently’.26 But it was certainly an exception, which also
cannot be justiied by the fact that Tory’s treatise was one of the latest. Verini’s Luminario, liber elementorum litterarum (1527),27 being
published just a couple of years before, also did not have any traces
which would make us think he was writing for the typefounders.
On the contrary, the alphabets of the early twentieth century
were mostly purposed for machine use. The drawings might have
been big (it is well–known that, for example, Eric Gill was irst of all
a stone–cutter, and one had to adapt his drawings to have been cut
as type),28 but the inal size of the letters was signiicantly smaller.
To say the least, Jan Tschichold submitted one of his geometric sans
serifs (c.1929) to Deberny & Peignot. Bayer type by Herber Bayer
(1933), in which, as the author claimed, ‘all letters were constructed
with geometrical lines and arches’,29 was issued by the Berthold type
foundry. Paul Renner’s Futura (1927) was released by the Bauer Type
Foundry. However, the abovementioned aspect of regularity serves
as a common denominator for these alphabets and provides a basis
for comparing them despite other factors, like the size of the letters,
the tools used for producing an inscription, and the purpose of the
alphabet.
8
1.2
30 Mosley, James. The Nymph and the Grot:
the revival of the sanserif letter. London:
Friends of the St Bribe Printing Library,
1999, p. 17.
31 Morison, Stanley. Politics and script.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, p. 31.
32 Morison, ref. 31, p. 35.
33 Burke, ref. 7, p. 96.
34 Ibid.
visual disparateness
There is another factor, which should be commented on: whereas all
the Renaissance alphabets are serifed, the Modernist geometrical
faces are usually sans serif. The latter also tend to have a very slight
contrast between the strokes or have no contrast at all, compared to
the contrasted Renaissance letters. Only Bayer type has serifs and is
highly contrasted. Other types (Futura, Universal type) are sans serif
and monoline. This striking difference in their appearance can at
irst sight be considered as separating the geometrical faces from the
two epochs rather than bringing them closer. However, this would
only be a supericial deduction.
One should remember that both the Renaissance and Modernist
artists kept classic inscriptions as a model for their work. But the monopoly on our perception of the classic letterforms was laid by those
who revived these forms irst. These were the artists of the ifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, and they revived the two characteristic features of letterforms—contrasting strokes and serifs, which remained
crucial in letter design until the end of the eighteenth century. However, as James Mosley stated, the ‘ancestry’ of these inscriptions is more
diverse.30 The uniform stroke in ancient inscriptions began yielding to
the contrasting stroke in Rome only in the 1st century ad,31 almost at
the same time that the Trajan column was built. So, by 114 ad, when
the model lettering was inscribed, not much time had passed since the
letters were monoline, and it was still obvious that the Roman capitals
had derived from the Greek monoline alphabet. However, this notable
ancestry of the classic letterforms was beyond the scope of the Renaissance artists, despite the fact that the contrast in the Trajan inscription itself was still relatively slight.32 Not because they might have not
been aware of it, but because they, unlike the Modernist artists, were
deliberately repeating particular classic forms, ignoring what was
before and near. Their persistence in their wish to correspond to the
model prevented them from moving a step further. The Modernists, on
the contrary, almost never declared their sources of inspiration, maybe
because often these sources were not even distinctly articulated. But
perhaps that is why they could break through to the origins of the classic lettering and kept the strokes of their letters uniform. The monoline
stroke was not a vogue; it can be directly linked to the initial pre–imperial way of making letters, especially taking into consideration the
Modernist’s concern with the archaic and primeval. For instance, it is
known that Paul Renner taught his students to reproduce the Roman
capitals ‘with a tool that produced a line of even thickness’.33 And he
claimed to have begun with the same exercise in his design of Futura.34
For the same reason, the eradication of serifs in the twentieth
century geometrical typefaces also does not ruin the afinity inherent
in the Renaissance and Modernist letters. The Modernists, being not
conined to the certain exemplary inscriptions within their practice,
9
35 See below on this point.
36 Morison, ref. 31, p. 11.
37 Burke, ref. 14, p. 154.
38 Cohen, Arthur A. Herbert Bayer: the
complete work. Cambridge, Massachusetts;
London: M I T Press, 1984, p. 215.
39 Evetts, ref. 17, p. v.
40 Evetts, ref. 17, p. 3.
41 Giovanni Mardersteig in his introduction
to the Alphabetum Romanum by Felice
Feliciano gave the same example as proof
that ancient inscriptions ‘were based on
exact geometrical drawings’. (Feliciano,
ref. 6, p. 10).
42 Grasby, ref. 22.
43 Seaby, Allen W. The Roman alphabet
and its derivatives. London: The Polyglot
Printing Co., Ltd., 1925, p. 2.
44 Verini, Giovam Baptista. Luminario, or
the third book of the Liber elementorum
litterarum on the construction of Roman
capitals. Cambridge: Harvard College
Library; Chicago: The Newberry Library,
1947, p. 5.
were able to develop the concept of the geometrical construction of
letters. One of the fundamental principles of this concept was the
simplicity of form.35 If, as Morison suggested, ‘seriing is equivalent
to a ceremonial embellishment’,36 serifs actually appeared on the opposite side from this concept. The Modernists, who called upon ‘the
complete elimination of all superluous elements’37 in letter design,
got rid of them as decorative elements not essential to the basic
forms of the letters. Considering Herbert Bayer, Arthur A. Cohen
wrote that his rejection of the typographer’s traditional affection for
fussy and ornamental typefaces, his return to a simpliied Roman
face and his advocacy of sans serif ‘relects a logical continuity that
extends the principles of functional design to the simpliication of a
classical Roman face’.38
Today no one can tell for sure whether classic inscriptions were
actually constructed geometrically. In the preface to his study of the
Trajan letters, L. C. Evetts suggested that ‘since we know that the
Romans used certain geometrical instruments for letter–craft, it is
reasonable to suppose that their letters might have been considered as
geometric units’.39 Grasby also believed in the primacy of the geometrical approach over just a long established tradition. He found out
that some inscriptions, apart from a horizontal grid or vertical lines
indicating margins, even had ‘the inely engraved construction lines
of the letters themselves including part of circles and their centres’.40
As a convincing example for his hypothesis he gave the inscription
on the tomb of Caecilia Metella,41 where ‘squares, circles, triangles
and the subdivision of the square into tenth parts of the line height
make a powerful early example of constructed capitals’.42 But, for
instance, Allen W. Seaby, former professor of Fine Art at the University of Reading, exposed another point of view. Discussing the Trajan
inscription, he claimed that ‘no compasses were used in setting out
the letters’,43 despite later numerous attempts to impose geometrical
shapes on them. Stanley Morison stuck with the same assumption. In
the introduction to Verini’s Luminario, he stressed that, according to
F. W. Goudy, the letters on the Trajan column did not ‘appear to have
been constructed upon the basis of the square’. He then quoted Edward Johnston, who had come to a conclusion, that it could not even
be said that the thickness of the mainstrokes within the inscription
was ‘a geometrical constant’.44
However, whether or not geometry underpinned the construction
of ancient letters is not that important. If it unambiguously did, we
would have probably had to consider them in the same line we draw
from the ifteenth and sixteenth century letterforms to the twentieth
century ones. Important is the fact, which became the initial premise
for comparing the Renaissance and Modernist letterforms: the artists
in both times claimed geometry to have been a governor of their
typographic practice.
10
In proof of the thesis
2.1
45 Tory, ref. 11, p. 26.
46 Ibid.
47 Verini, ref. 44, p. 15.
48 Wittkower, Rudolf. Architectural principles
in the age of humanism. Chichester:
Academy Editions, 1998, p. 38.
49 Wood, Christopher S. Forger, replica,
iction: temporalities of German
Renaissance art. Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2008, p. 289.
50 Tory, ref. 11, p. 22. Herman Zapf noticed a
parallel between this passage and the words
from Edward Johnston’s calligraphy manual
Writing & Illumination, & Lettering. There
he expressed almost identical thought: ‘Le
O peut être considéré comme la forme clé
d’un alphabet. Si l’on regarde le O et le
I de n’importe quel alphabet, on peut en
déduire avec quasi certitude la forme des
autres lettres’. [O may be regarded as the
Key letter of an alphabet. Given an O and
an I of any alphabet, we can make a very
good guess at the forms of the other letters].
(Zapf, Herman. Typographie des caractères
Romains de la Renaissance. In: Cahiers
GUTenberg, 2000, no. 37 – 38, pp. 48 – 49.
English text from: Johnston, Edward.
Writing & illuminating, & lettering.
London: J. Hogg, 1906, p. 270).
51 Dürer, Albrecht. On the just shaping of
letters. From the Applied geometry of
Albrecht Dürer. Book I I I. New York:
Grolier Club, 1917, p. 35.
52 Burke, ref. 14, p. 29.
simplification and reduction
A geometrical approach imposes certain restrictions on the variety
of forms used. Other restrictions are imposed by the artists themselves. In the Renaissance, artists assumed that there existed divine
forms (no matter what ield of arts or crafts they were applied to)
and preferred some of them to others. Geofroy Tory, for example,
called the circle, square, and triangle ‘the three most perfect igures of geometry’.45 These three igures the ancients used ‘wishing
to demonstrate the extraordinary perfectness of their letters’,46 he
wrote in the treatise Champ leury. Giovam Baptista Verini notiied a ‘gentle reader’ of his book Luminario that the circle was ‘the
most perfect of igures’.47 The circle, Rudolf Wittkower conirmed,
among all geometrical igures was considered to be the most perfect
and ‘was given special signiicance’.48 It is obvious that the urge of
perfection was the force that moved the artists of the Renaissance.
‘Antiquarians were conident in the rightness of the geometrically
constructed alphabet. They believed that imperial stonemasons had
used it not because it was the conventional alphabet of their time, but
because it was the best alphabet’, wrote Christopher S. Wood.49 This
urge for perfection would be substituted by the urge for the universal
in Modernism. But, interestingly, the way to both was the same. This
way went not only through rationality, inherent to both epochs, but
also through simplicity.
Geometrical forms that the artists had chosen to outline the
shapes of the letters were simple to the extreme. It was also a common practice to reduce the number of these forms, of which the
alphabet consisted, within the typographic practice. The letters were
(or were said to be) constructed only from certain units, or elements,
the selection of which differed from one artist to another depending on one’s ingenuity. It is signiicant that Tory claimed that those
were the two letters, I and O, ‘from which all the other Attic letters
are made and fashioned’.50 In Of the just shaping of letters (1525),
on construction of the text or quadrate letters, Albrecht Dürer also
said: ‘Although the alphabet begins with the writing of A, yet shall
I (not needlessly) in the irst place undertake to draw an I; because
almost all the other letters are formed after this letter’.51 I would say,
their approach to the form making can be compared with factoring
an equation: the solution is the most beautiful when it is ultimately
clear and concise. In relation to that, it is interesting to follow Jan
Tschichold’s words from the Die neue Typographie (1928) manifesto
written at the beginning of the twentieth century. Paragraph 7 stated
that typographic design was construction ‘in the simplest form’ and
‘with the minimum means’.52 Moreover, in 1925, Tschichold talked
11
53 Burke, ref. 14, p. 311.
54 ‘Dans son ouvrage Typograie als Kunst,
publié en 1922, il avait déjà afirmé leur
suprématie: «Au sommet des caractères
européens se situent les capitales romaines,
élaborées à partir de cercles, triangles et
carrés, les forms les plus simples possibles
et le plus contrastées qui soient’. [In his
Typograie als Kunst, published in 1922,
he had already afirmed their [the Roman
capitals] supremacy: ‘At the summit of
all the European characters, there are the
Romans capitals, which are made of circles,
triangles and squares, the simplest and the
most contrasted forms’]. (Rauly, Alexandre
Dumas de, et al. Futura: une gloire
typographique. Paris: Éditions Norma,
2011, p. 20. Translation by the author).
55 Bayer, ref. 29, p. 26.
56 Bayer, ref. 29, p. 78.
57 Tory, ref. 11, p. 48.
58 Bayer, ref. 55.
59 Burke, ref. 53.
60 Krauss, Rosalind E. The originality of the
avant–garde and other modernist myths.
Cambridge, Massachusetts; London,
England: M I T Press, 1986, p. 9.
61 Krauss, ref. 60, p. 10.
about ‘elemental typography’, directly using the word ‘element’ to
describe his understanding of typography. This trend to reduction,
generally characteristic of the geometrical construction of letters
and of the Modernist practice particularly, revealed itself in another
quote of Jan Tschichold: ‘Inner organization is the limitation to the
elemental means of typography’.53 Remarkably, Tschichold echoed
Tory’s statement and claimed that squares, circles and triangles
were inherently elemental forms and should be used in constructing
letters. Paul Renner shared this idea, moreover, linking the limited
choice of the elements to the construction of the Roman capitals. In
Typograie als Kunst (1922) he wrote that the Roman capitals occupy
the top in the hierarchy of the characters. They consist of circles,
triangles, and squares, which are the simplest possible forms.54
Herbert Bayer in the essay toward a new alphabet (1925) also wrote
that letters should be designed ‘with basic geometric elements to
produce a harmonious character of the alphabet’.55 Later, in basic
alfabet (1960), he explained that then the text would be easier to perceive: ‘It seems reasonable to assume that the work of the eye and the
brain would be facilitated if all symbols and their group images were
made of the simplest and most exact design elements’.56 In both times
artists believed that the geometrical and elemental approach to the
construction of alphabet inluenced the comprehension of the text.
Simple and clear letterforms were meant to transmit information
clearly. The abovementioned Tory, who was concerned with language
more than the usual typographer, said that the circle was not only the
most perfect of all igures, but also, what is more important for us,
‘the most comprehensive’.57 The same can be found in the statements
of the Modernist typographers. Herbert Bayer put ‘simpliication of
form for the sake of legibility (the simpler the optical appearance
the easier its comprehension)’58 as a major requirement in his essay
toward a new alphabet. Jan Tschichold in the essay Elemental
typography (1925) proclaimed similar principles: ‘The communication must appear in the briefest, simplest, most urgent form’.59
The elemental approach also can be found in the use of grids,
which was common in the both epochs. The grid is ‘a structure
that has remained emblematic of the modernist ambition within the
visual arts’.60 In the Renaissance, it can be found in the ifteenth and
sixteenth century drawings on human proportions and perspective
as well as in the drawings on the construction of letters. Rosalind
E. Krauss wrote that those grids of the Renaissance in perspective
studies, which demonstrated ‘the way reality and its representation
could be mapped onto one another’,61 opposed the very essence of
the Modernist grid. The latter was self–contained and had nothing
in common with the representation of reality. It is true, the usual way
the Renaissance masters used the grid is described in a woodcut by
Albrecht Dürer (ig. 3), which Jack H. Williamson presented in his
12
ig. 3 Albrecht Dürer. Draftsman drawing a reclining woman (below).
ig. 4 Tory shows letters distorted by perspective (left).
13
62 Williamson, Jack H. The grid: history, use,
and meaning. In: Design Issues, 1986,
vol. 3, no. 2, p. 19.
63 Ibid.
64 The plan either of the building or
letterform was even more meaningful than
this plan’s implementation. Wittkower
noticed that the mathematical relations
which the Renaissance architects used for
their plans actually could not be perceived
when one did not see the plan but was
just walking about in a building. Then
the perception of the sophisticated and
thoroughly calculated geometrical scheme
represented ‘an absolute value, independent
of our subjective and transitory perception’.
(Wittkower, ref. 48, p. 18). The same was
true for the artists drawing letters. Tory’s
indignation of Pacioli’s proportions was
actually indignation of the plan, not the
letters. The difference between the ratios
1:10 and 1:9 is not perceptible ‘as Stanley
Morison demonstrated by placing side by
side a 1:9 A and a 1:10 A’. (Bowen, Barbara
C. Geofroy Tory’s “Champ Fleury” and
its major sources. In: Studies in Philology,
Winter 1979, vol. 76, no. 1, p. 20). This is
also justiied by the fact that though the
artists were manifesting faithfulness to the
geometrical principle of construction, a few
had cheated producing certain letterforms.
65 Relevant are the words of L. C. Evetts
who discussed the proportions of the Trajan
inscription: ‘It is possible to establish
proportions at two important points. These
are where the strokes are widest, and on
the centre–line where they are narrowest.
The proportion at the commencement of
the serifs, where the strokes reach their
greatest width, is one–tenth of the height of
the letters, whilst that on the centre–line of
the lettering where the bi–concavity reaches
its limit, is one–eleventh. As a unit of scale
in the construction of the letters of this alphabet, the former proportion repeats itself
again and again, and appears to be used
as a unit in much the same manner as the
module in classical architecture’. (Evetts,
ref. 17, p. 14). Also see more on Andrea Palladio and Le Corbusier in: Sherer, Daniel.
Le Corbusier’s discovery of Palladio in
1922 and the modernist transformation of
the classical code. In: Perspecta, 2004,
vol. 35, pp. 20 – 39.
66 Carter, ref. 4, p. 9.
67 Gray, Nicolete. The Newberry alphabet
and the revival of the Roman capital in
ifteenth–century Italy. In: Paul Stiff, ed.
Typography Papers 6. London: Hyphen
Press, 2005, p. 12.
68 Ryder, John. Lines of the alphabet in the
sixteenth century. London: The Stellar Press
& The Bodley Head, 1965, p. 59.
69 Feliciano, ref. 10.
70 Tory, ref. 11, p. 86.
research on grids.62 A lattice in front of the artist breaks the three–
dimensional igure behind this lattice ‘into a set of modules for the
purpose of transferring and reconstructing it on another surface
with a corresponding grid’.63 Interestingly, this seems to be partially
relevant for the artists concerned with letters, too. Letters, as will be
shown below, were considered rather as part of the architecture and
could be perceived as objects in space. Characteristic is the image by
Geofroy Tory where he put the letters A, I, and F on different sides
of the cube, thus exposing them not on a plain surface, but three–
dimensionally (ig. 4). Yet, actually, the grid was not quite a transferring tool for the artists drawing letterforms, but rather constructing.
The grid in the Renaissance letter design was a more powerful and
meaningful tool than one could imagine.64 It should be compared not
to the grids appearing in paintings or drawings of the periods (the
ones Krauss discussed), but to the grids shown in architectural plans.
In the Renaissance and Modernist architecture, a module served a
principle role, just like in the letter design we explore.65
A module governed the whole appearance of the letter. And the
module was not chosen accidentally, but thoroughly calculated. Matthew Carter said that the grid by Geofroy Tory was ‘the irst in the
history of letter design’.66 However, this can be questioned. Nicolete
Gray in her essay on the Newberry alphabet seems to have displayed
an earlier example. The alphabet, which was constructed at the
end of the ifteenth century, had a grid, though not a square–based,
like Tory had, but a line–based (a term by Jack H. Williamson). An
anonymous designer had vertically divided a square in which a letter
should be placed in nine equal parts (ig. 5). One–ninth had become its unit, and the mainstroke of the letter was one unit width.67
I assume this proportion was not accidental as the same one could
be found in the alphabets by Giovambattista Palatino68 and Luca
Pacioli.69 Both made the width of the mainstroke one–ninth of the
height of the letter. Palatino made dividing marks on his drawings
(ig. 6). He showed that the width of the heavier stroke of his A is
proportioned 9:1 to its height by indicating this width on the side of
the square against a nine unit scale (marks a and c). Drawing letters
for De divina proportione (1509), Pacioli did not make a grid, but
actually the question itself—the ratio of height to thickness of the
capital stem—is a question of the fundamental unit, or a grid. This
question was of major importance, and almost every artist had his
opinion on it. Geofroy Tory denounced the proportions of Pacioli70
and divided both sides of his square in ten equal parts (ig. 7). Not
only did Tory imply that ten was the perfect number of the ancients,
but he also mentioned the nine Muses and Apollo (which is ten) that
would, along with the human proportions, comprise a perfect harmony within the Attic letters.71 His square grid is more familiar to our
eyes and more alike to the Modernist grid. But what is important:
14
ig. 5 The letter F from the
Newberry Alphabet and the vertical
grid (left).
ig. 6 Palatino’s drawing for the letter
A. See dividing marks on the upper
side of the square (above left).
ig. 7 Tory divides the square into
one hundred units. (above middle).
ig. 8 Horfei’s drawing for the letter
M. See dividing marks on each side of
the square (above right).
15
71 Tory, ref. 11, pp. 40, 46.
72 Feliciano, ref. 23.
73 Feliciano, ref. 23.
74 Ciapponi, ref. 9, p. 21.
75 Torniello, ref. 21, p. 86.
76 Burke, ref. 14.
77 Ibid.
considering that all the artists had a square as a igure to inscribe
their capitals, it did not matter whether to divide it both vertically
and horizontally or only vertically, like the author of the Newberry
alphabet did. Because in order to resolve the former question of ratio,
a vertical grid would be enough, taking into account that the sides of
the square were equal. A one hundred unit grid is also seen behind
the Alfabeto delle maivscole antiche (c.1590) by Luca Horfei da
Fano, the constructing function of which is evident in the drawing
of the letter M. The stems of the letter at its bottom and top did not
exactly correspond with the marks dividing the sides of the square in
ten. Thus Horfei provided additional marks indicating the width of
the stem, which were obviously equal to the unit of the grid (ig. 8).
The same ratio 10:1 was taken by Felice Feliciano, since ten was
the perfect number: ‘It was an old usage to form the letter from a
circle and square, the sum of which forms amounts to 52, whence is
derived the perfect number, which is ten’.72 But it is crucial that,
although Feliciano’s drawings did not provide a grid, there seems to
be an invisible grid behind them, which Feliciano had articulated,
but had not drawn. Apart from the proportion of the mainstroke to
the height of the letter, he mentioned how much of the square the
mainstroke should occupy: ‘And thus the thickness [of the mainstroke] of your letter should be the tenth part of the height, and in
this manner it will have as much of the circle as of the square’.73
A grid is found in the treatise on the alphabet by Fra Giocondo da
Verona, which resulted from dividing a square into four smaller
squares and drawing diagonals within them. This grid, as the accompanying text explained, would be a basis (or the fundamental thing)
for the construction of any letter.74 Finally, Francesco Torniello da
Novara introduced a logical system of measurement within his grid,
which was later adopted and developed by type designers. To draw
a letter, he said, one ‘must draw a perfect square and divide it into
eighteen parts along each side by means of vertical and horizontal
lines’.75 One–ninth of the height, or the distance equal to two scale
divisions, he named ‘punto’ (point). This basic measurement was
used to deine all the proportions of the letter, including the lengths
of the radius of the circles needed to make curvy lines and serifs.
As for Modernism, the grid is commonly known as a crucial
element within the visual arts, and obviously needs a less detailed
explanation. To say the least, Jan Tschichold recommended writing
exercises in letter design on squared paper, which is conirmed by
numerous examples. What is remarkable, ‘the grid was only taken as
a guideline on the vertical axis’,76 just like in the case of the
Renaissance artists. Joost Schmidt, a tutor at the Bauhaus who taught
geometrical construction of letters, also practiced drawing letters
‘with compass and ruler within the conines of a grid’.77 Paul
Renner had Futura capitals drawn on graph paper (ig. 9). Although
16
ig. 9
Renner’s capitals on the grid (above).
ig. 10 Tschichold’s constructible block–script (below).
17
78 Although Christopher Burke in his book
attributes this drawing (c.1925) either
to Paul Renner or to Ferdinand Kramer.
(Burke, ref. 7, p. 89).
79 Rauly, Alexandre Dumas de, et al.
Futura: une gloire typographique. Paris:
Éditions Norma, 2011, p. 21.
80 Burke, ref. 14, p. 180.
81 Bayer, ref. 55.
82 Tory, ref. 11.
83 Morison, ref. 31, p. 322.
84 Cohen, ref. 38.
85 Bayer, ref. 55.
86 Burke, ref. 37.
87 Bayer, ref. 56.
the original drawing has disappeared, it was reproduced in the documents of the Bauer foundry in 1959.78 The author of Futura also recalled such a method of drawing on a grid in his memoires.79 The most
evident example of a grid performing its constructing function is a
constructible block–script by Tschichold (c.1930). Due to the construction lines, it was accessible even for those with no previous experience
in drawing letters (ig. 10).80
The same trend for simpliication and reduction manifested itself in
the desire to keep only one case in the geometrical alphabets. It seems
more natural for the Renaissance alphabets. The most evident reason
for this is that the artists were following inscriptions from the epoch
that did not know lower case. For the same reason they, for example,
did not draw some letters, like W. Obviously, they were restricted by the
tradition. Lower case, as Herbert Bayer noticed, was developed from
the use of the pen,81 and its construction within the geometrical principles would have been a complicated task for that time for sure. But,
irst, the Renaissance letters also had calligraphic features. Secondly,
the whole idea of designing a lowercase upon the same principles as the
Roman capitals was not something unconceivable then. Tory mentioned
that a Compass and Rule ‘are necessary and requisite for making well,
not only the Attic letter, but also the lettre de forme’.82 There was also a
daring artist Ferdinando Ruano, who ‘applied the geometrical method
to the Chancery Cursive’83 in both lower case and upper case in his
Sette alphabeti di varie lettere formati con ragion geometrica (1554).
So, perhaps, other reasons than mere tradition might have restrained the
artists to one case.
In Modernism, the decision to keep only one case was deinitely
more conscious and deliberate. Although, certainly, not everybody accepted it, it was not a single fact but a major trend advocated by such
inluential typographers as Jan Tschichold and Herbert Bayer. The
Modernist artists usually suggested leaving only lower case. In 1925, at
Bayer’s suggestion, who was then in charge of the Typography Department at the Bauhaus, ‘Gropius abolished the use of majuscules in all
printed matter and correspondence at the Bauhaus’.84 Bayer manifested
that ‘we do not speak a capital “A” and a small “a”. To convey one
sound we do not need large and small letter symbols. One sound, one
symbol’.85 His premise for the use of lower case was that capital letters
were used much more rarely. Tschichold, also preferring lower case
to upper case, said that ascenders and descenders of the small roman
letters increased legibility.86 Later Bayer would agree on this subject,
and in basic alfabet he would say: ‘Lower case letters are more legible
than capital letters because the ascenders of b, d, h, l, f, and to some
degree the descenders of g, p, y, lend the eye a supporting point of
reference’.87 His next move would be towards creating an ‘optofonetic
alfabet’—forms that would depend on the sound of the letters. Following the same path of reduction Bayer would suggest eliminating double
18
88 Burke, ref. 14.
89 Schmalenbach, Werner. Kurt Schwitters.
London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1970,
p. 183.
90 Mills, Mike. Herbert Bayer’s universal
type in its historical contexts. In: Lupton,
Ellen and J. Abbott Miller, eds. The abc’s
of [triangle, square, circle]: the Bauhaus
and design theory. London: Thames and
Hudson, 1993, p. 42.
91 Verini, ref. 44, p. 18.
ig. 11 The letters A, M from the
Bifur type.
letters, such as ph, omit letters which are not pronounced, etc. More
proof that these practices of sticking to the one case alphabet with
the choice of either upper case or lower case are related, is found in
the teaching method of the Bauhaus. An obligatory course on letters
taught by Joost Schmidt was at irst conined to the geometrical construction of capital letters. In due course, capital letters were substituted for the letters from Bayer’s universal alphabet.88 There are
also less known examples, which still appear to be more conclusive
in terms of this research. One of them is Kurt Schwitters’s Systemschrift (1927). As a matter of fact, he, being concerned with the
problem of the ‘two alphabets’, preferred to stay with the upper case.
Like Bayer and Tschichold, he also offered not just a typeface, but
a script, exploring the correspondence between sound and spelling.
What is noteworthy is that in the forms of the letters he was unmistakably inluenced by Theo Van Doesburg, whose typeface of retangular–shaped letters had been designed on the basis of the Roman
capitals.89 Another example is the solely upper case display typeface
Bifur (1929) by Cassandre, which in such forms as A, M, R seems to
have been following the Roman capitals (ig. 11). Signiicantly, in the
original specimen to another of his one case types Peignot (1937),
Cassandre wrote that lowercase letterforms ‘will soon come to seem
as archaic as the shapes of Gothic characters’,90 thus putting emphasis on the Roman origin of his letters.
2.2
social and cultural contexts
However, not only the forms themselves are important, but also how
they are proportioned. Proportions should also be perfect, and calculating these, the artists of the Renaissance referred to the man as a
measure and model. Deinitely, this was a part of the greater changes
in the human’s perception of the world. A human being was then
placed into the centre of the Universe. But, surprisingly, the adoption
of Protagoras’s statement, that the man is the measure of all things,
did not make that man an untouchable model. On the contrary, the
man was then examined as a carcass on the slab. The humanists
almost literally came up with a ruler and started to measure the
human’s body relating it to the predetermined geometric shapes, or
rather relating shapes to the igure. Exemplifying this is the image of
the Vitruvian man—a male igure with his arms and legs stretched
out inscribed in a circle and a square (ig. 12). A similar image can
be found in many treatises on the construction of letters we discuss.
Giovam Baptista Verini placed a picture of a man inscribed in a circle with a compass indicating a distance from his feet to his navel as
a diameter of the circle (ig. 14). A perfect igure, according to Verini,
should be formed of nine units, where one unit is a head. ‘Roman letters were derived from such a man’, that is, a well–built man, Verini
wrote in Luminario.91 However, curiously, the man in the picture is
19
ig. 12 Vitruvian igure, from
Cesariano’s edition of Vitruvius, 1521
(left).
ig. 13 Tory shows a man inscribed in a
circle and a square (below).
ig. 14 A man inscribed in a circle from
Verini’s Luminario (bottom).
20
92 Tory, ref. 11, p. 47.
93 Taylor, R. Emmett. No royal road: Luca
Pacioli and his times. New York: Arno
Press, 1980, p. 272.
94 Taylor, ref. 93, p. 255.
95 Whitford, Frank, ed. The Bauhaus: masters
& students by themselves. London: Conran
Octopus, 1992, p. 267.
96 Ibid.
97 Bayer, ref. 29, p. 44.
only six heads tall, but this only proves that a Renaissance artist was
guided by the ratio only, not the vision or his other senses. Geofroy
Tory claimed that his letters were ‘so well conformed to nature that
they agree in measurement and proportion with the human body’.92
Unlike Verini, Tory thought that a perfect man standing irm consisted of ten units. Therefore, he divided both sides of the square in
which a letter should be placed in ten, arranging the abovementioned
grid of a hundred units. He also included pictures relating a human
face to the basic letters, like I, and to the square in which all of them
were placed. Luca Pacioli did not include in his book De divina
proportione a full picture of a man, but also claimed that ‘every
measurement, with its name, is derived from the human body’ and
that ‘in the human body every sort of proportion and proportionality can be found’.93 He placed a plate of the human head showing the
correct proportion just before the plates showing the construction
of the Latin letters.94 The abovementioned drawings are universally
recognised as corresponding with the age in which they were created.
The concept born in the Renaissance, or the age of humanism, which
put the man as the greatest value, was visualised in such complicated
schemes. But, noteworthily, a similar attitude towards man can be
found later, in the age of Modernism. Oskar Schlemmer, a Bauhaus
participant and teacher, provides a signiicant example. He was not
a typographer, but his ideas, I assume, relected the general spirit of
the Bauhaus, and those who constructed letters, too. Hans Fischli,
a student of the Bauhaus, recalled Schlemmer’s course titled ‘Man’.
Apart from teaching the Golden Section (incidentally, rediscovered
by Pacioli and deined as the ‘divine proportion’), Schlemmer talked
about human proportions governing arts and crafts, about ‘the human body with its harmonic series of measurements’.95 Fischli wrote
about the artist: ‘A painter and dancer showed us—young people—
Man at the centre of all things and revealed his image. He taught us
the theory of harmony by using the human body as an example’.96
These words can be easily illustrated by the pictures made in the ifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but also by Schlemmer’s own drawing—Man in the sphere of ideas (1928), which served as a teaching
board during his course (ig. 15). It showed man’s relationship to
space, time, and ideas, providing details on the human anatomy.
Interestingly, his drawing of the man was just as crude and obviously
disproportioned as Verini’s drawing. A painting Human bone
structure compared with architectural structures97 by Herbert Bayer,
creator of the universal type project, is also characteristic of its time.
A human skeleton and its parts were drawn against a pillar and an
arch, discovering the relationship between the human anatomy and
architectural forms.
I should say that although texts on typography were discussed
above, it is obvious that their authors were mostly pondering over
21
ig. 15 Oskar Schlemmer. Man in the sphere of ideas, 1928.
22
98 Feliciano, ref. 6, p. 35.
99 Wittkower, ref. 48, p. 22.
100 Bayer, ref. 29, p. 13.
the forms and proportions in general, sometimes not even anchoring
their relections to certain alphabets. The clue lies in the concept of
the Renaissance man. Having no differentiation between designer,
artist, and scientist, the Renaissance man, or the universal man
(actually, a polymath), had the same principles for all of his activities.
While constructing the letterforms the artists could easily switch to
the architectural science, or mathematics, if they found it appropriate for their research, and could even be architects or mathematicians themselves. For instance, in their search for divine proportions,
almost all the Renaissance artists were examining Vitruvius’s book
De architectura. This book is where partially the perfect number ten
came from in the letter drawings of Felice Feliciano, Geofroy Tory.
According to Vitruvius, ‘this number was held by the ancients to
be perfect and that Plato ascribed its origin to the ten ingers of the
hand’, noticed Giovanni Mardersteig.98 Basically, the idea of relating
objects and forms to the human body also came from architecture.
Some of his passages combined an interest in the human anatomy
as a source of perfect proportions with a love and respect towards
mathematics. It was Vitruvius who had introduced in his treatise
‘the famous remarks on the proportions of the human igure, which
should be relected in the proportions of temples’.99 Modernism
revived this type of man, who wanted to embrace as many skills
and as much knowledge as possible. Artists again wanted to avoid
coninement to a certain activity despite the growth of specialisations and despite the division of labour that took place in the Modern
times. Herbert Bayer, author of the universal alphabet, demonstrated
this longing for such a type of man: ‘The universal man, as Goethe
represented him, is extinct through the accumulation of knowledge
which can no longer be mastered by the individual mind. A division
of knowledge into deined areas took place and created the specialist.
The artist also is a specialist, but to his specialty must be added the
understanding of a wider orbit’.100 Architecture among other ields,
as will be shown further, turned out to be strongly connected with
the geometrical construction of letters both in the Renaissance and
Modernism.
The point is that the architectural principle, a special attitude to
the act of building, is a cornerstone in the ideology both during the
Renaissance and Modernist periods. No other ield of art was this
important and this inluential. It should be mentioned that, not only
were the perfect forms and proportions irst of all discovered and
elaborated in relation to the architecture, but also the letters themselves were considered irst of all as part of the architectural science.
Luca Pacioli, for instance, explained his wish to include a part on
typography in De divina proportione by the fact that the letters were
placed upon pillars, tablets, and monuments. They should make the
work beautiful and declare the purpose of the building, and that is
23
101 Taylor, ref. 93, p. 274.
102 Morison, ref. 24, p. 17.
103 Payne, Alina A. Rudolf Wittkower and
architectural principles in the age of
Modernism. In: Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians, 1994, vol. 53,
no. 3, pp. 327 – 328.
104 Whitford, ref. 95, p. 38.
105 Kinross, Robin. Modern typography: an
essay in critical history. London: Hyphen
Press, 2004, p. 110.
106 Railing, Patricia. The idea of construction
as the creative principle in Russian avant–
garde art. In: Leonardo, 1995, vol. 28, no. 3,
p. 197.
107 It should be noted, that the irst complete
specimen of the Romain du roi is dated
1760. (Mosley, James. French academicians
and modern typography. In: Stiff, Paul, ed.
Typography Papers 2, London: Hyphen
Press, 1997, p. 13).
108 Gray, ref. 1.
109 Ibid.
why he would like to show a ine ancient alphabet in his book.101 It
is for the stone–cutters and architects that this part was purposed.
Felice Feliciano took as a model for his geometrical alphabet an
inscription from the monuments and public buildings, not a hand
written script. Damianus Moyllus is likely to have printed his treatise
on classic letter design (c.1480) ‘for an author, who was perhaps a
teacher of some branch of architecture’.102 One should admit that,
although for a polymath all arts and sciences are equal, during the
Renaissance and Modernist periods architecture seemed to become
the irst among equals. Alina A. Payne pointed out that during the
age of humanism architecture took ‘a leading role amongst the arts
in materializing a Weltanschauung rooted in a mathematical conception of the universe’.103 Therefore it is not surprising that general
principles of construction had come into letter design directly from
architecture. The same is true for Modernism. The Bauhaus manifesto proclaimed that it strove ‘to unite all creative activity within a single whole, to reunify all the practical artistic disciplines—sculpture,
painting, the applied arts and crafts – as the inseparable components
of a new architecture’.104 Consequently, no wonder that the same
word – construction—was actually used (by the artists themselves,
not only by the scholars) for both designing a geometrical alphabet
and erecting a building. Important was the igure of ‘the engineer’.
‘It is the Corbusian vision that lies behind the talismanic igure in
Tschichold’s Die neue Typographie: ‘the engineer! This engineer is
the designer of our epoch’, said Robin Kinross.105
2.3
on romain du roi
‘Construction is the irst word of geometry, its method’, said Patricia
Railing.106 However, time has come to introduce an example where
construction and geometry are divorced. Talking about geometrically constructed letterforms it is impossible to ignore the Romain
du roi, the production of which was undertaken in France in the late
seventeenth century.107
Nicolete Gray said that ‘the history of lettering can be seen as
the repeated revival of the Roman letter’.108 Departures and comebacks to the ancient tradition she also compared to ‘the alternation
between classical and romantic’.109 Calculating the periodicity of
the classical phase succeeding the romantic one, almost equal time
spans between the Renaissance revival of the ancient letterforms
and the Romain du roi (approximately 1460—1690) and later between the Romain du roi and the Modernist revival (approximately
1690—1920) can be observed. This may suggest that the production
of the Romain du roi, which is exactly in the middle between the
years 1460 and 1920, is a separate phase. However, I believe it is
not. ‘This was naturally the end, reached in 1692—1702, of the use
of the geometrical method, as applied to calligraphy or typography’,
24
110 Morison, ref. 83.
111 The fact that the Modernist stage was
much shorter than the Renaissance one
may perhaps be justiied by the general
increase of speed inherent to the epoch.
112 In his article on Cresci, James Mosley
showed such late examples as from 1598
(Marc’ Antonio Rossi), 1602 (Cesare
Domenichi), and even 1789 (Fabrizio
Badesio). (Mosley, ref. 3, pp. 144 – 145).
113 Jammes, André. Académisme et
typographie: the making of the Romain du
roi. In: Journal of the Printing Historical
Society, 1965, no. 1, p. 76.
114 Ibid.
115 Meiss, Millard. The painter’s choice:
problems in the interpretation of
Renaissance art. New York, Hagerstown,
San Francisco, London: Harper & Row,
Publishers, 1976, p. 181.
116 Ruano, Ferdinando. Sette alphabeti
di varie lettere. Nieuwkoop: Miland
Publishers, 1971, p. [not paginated]
(Translation for the author by Pio De
Rose).
117 Jammes, ref. 113, p. 78.
said Stanley Morison.110 Indeed, it was not a new stage in revival of
the ancient letterforms. It was a protracted tail of the same stage, the
culmination of which fell at the ifteenth and sixteenth century.111
It should be remembered that, apparently, occasional geometrically
constructed alphabets appeared until as late as the seventeenth century.112 The French academy did not refer directly to the classic Roman
lettering exemplars, but referred to the letterforms shaped by Tory,
Pacioli, and Dürer.113 This is after them that a geometrical method of
constructing letters was taken by the Académie des Sciences. Thus, a
double distortion of the perception of classic letterforms took place.
In addition, the development at its end had already come not only
through the long Renaissance period, but also through Mannerism
and the Baroque. And what was left from the initial Renaissance
premise was a formal compliance with such principles as the geometrical construction of letters and the use of the grid.
A grid seems to have been adopted after Geofroy Tory’s Champ
leury. However, the grid of the Romain du roi was something completely different from the Renaissance (as well from the Modernist)
model. According to the plan adopted by Jacques Jaugeon and his
colleagues, it was a square–based grid, but the main square, in which
a letter was placed, had been ‘divided into 64 parts, each subdivided
into 36 others, making a total of 2,304 little squares for roman capitals’.114 With such a tiny module, such a grid could serve neither as a
constructing tool, nor even as a transferring tool, especially considering that the scientists knew their alphabet would become a printing
type. There was another attempt to construct letters by Louis Simonneau (1695). In his engravings, the sides of the main square were
divided into eight, arranging a grid of sixty four units. Although in
that case the mainstroke of the letters was equal to one unit, the proportion 8:1 was quite arbitrary and could hardly be explained by any
other reason than ‘taste’. Proportions 9:1 and 10:1 were explained
above. But even the less popular proportion 12:1, used, for instance,
by Moyllus, can be justiied by its reference to Vitruvius. Millard
Meiss mentioned that in relation to Andrea Mantegna, whose preferred ratio was just the same, and who then ‘may have intended to
conform to ancient authority, particularly Vitruvius’. ‘While many of
the “ancients” held 10 to be the perfect number, others preferred 6.
Twelve was an essential part of the numerical pattern that is inherent
in 6, and it was called displasios’, he wrote.115 However, this proportion 8:1, most likely, incidentally, coincides with the one in Ruano’s
alphabet. Ferdinand Ruano suggested dividing the square in ‘eight
heads’ and ‘give to one of these heads the size of your character’.116
But even then, not the module was chosen as a guide, but the eye.
Jaugeon spoke: ‘We made letters of every size and proportion, for
which we took our eyes as judges, and those which they found most
to their taste were the ones we chose’.117 The grid served rather as
25
118 Interestingly, Boileau was among those who
assured the texts for the publication known
as the Cabinet du Roi. (Jammes, ref. 113,
p. 75).
119 Jammes, ref. 117.
120 Burke, ref. 14, p. 196.
121 Gray, ref. 1, p. 162.
122 Carter, Harry. Fournier on typefounding:
the text of the Manuel typographique
translated into English. London, 1930,
pp. 6 – 9. (From Jammes, ref. 113, p. 77).
123 Jammes, ref. 113, p. 83.
124 This is how Allen W. Seaby called it.
(Seaby, ref. 43, p. 3).
a background, a squared paper onto which the letters would be
drawn (ig. 16). Nicolas Boileau, a French poet and critic of the same
period, produced an opposition of the two concepts—vérité (truth)
and vraisemblance (verisimilitude) giving preference to the latter.
In the drawings of the Romain du roi, a verisimilitude of the letters being constructed geometrically also seems to have been more
precious than the truth.118 Geometry was present, but numerous lines
and circles were outlining, not constructing the letterforms. The
words of the contemporary of Pierre–Simon Fournier were aimed to
criticise the Romain du roi for the geometrical approach in design,
but paradoxically seem to have been related to the thoughts of the
scientists themselves: ‘I would beware of going into the details of
the different geometrical constructions necessary to form each letter.
Taste certainly has more place than reason in the beauty and proportion of the characters. Geometry may have followed invention by
providing a rule for an approved form, but it did not precede it’.119
They interestingly correlate with Tschichold’s statement presumably from the 1940s, when he had stepped back from his Modernist
convictions and fell into the classicist stage. A typescript for one of
his lectures stated: ‘Geometry is a good servant, but a bad master’.120
Gray expressed the same idea, that geometry was actually not involved in the construction of the Romain du roi. She said, that those
alphabets of the Romain du roi ‘are shown on a grid, but they were
not constructed on a grid; the inal arbiter of the design was the eye,
not mathematics’.121 It is valid to say that the French Academy also
adopted Torniello’s point system. But unlike Torniello, then and till
now it has been used not as a construction method, but as a system to
measure type size.
It is important to note that the Romain du roi also violated the
fundamental principle of the geometrical construction discussed
above—the tendency towards simpliication and reduction. Not only
because multiple lines and curves were sometimes obviously superluous: ‘Are so many squares needed to make an O, which is round, and
so many circles to make other letters which are square?’122 But also
because it included not even four alphabets as it would be generally
accepted and later on (roman and italic with upper and lower case),
but at least twenty.123
As for the forms of the letters, most of the capital letters of
the Romain du roi indeed more or less corresponded to the classic models. Among them was the pointed A. Its horizontal bar was
also thicker than the thin leg, which can be considered as a reference to Geofroy Tory’s letter A. Among the Renaissance alphabets
such a proportion could be found only in his alphabet. Unusual was
a vertical stress, which though had been provided as an option by
Luca Pacioli in O and by Ferdinando Ruano. There was more serious
deviation in the letter P. It did not have an ‘unjoined loop’,124 which
26
ig. 16 The engraved letters L and M from the Romain du roi.
27
125 Gray, ref. 67, p. 13.
126 James Mosley discusses the abrupt
departure from the straight–leg R to
a curved–leg one by Eric Gill in his
blog. This departure revealed itself in
an inscription cut by Gill in 1907 to the
memory of Irene Nichols. Some new
features to the characters were introduced,
including the curved–tailed R, and none
of them resembled the letters of the Trajan
column or any other lettering of Imperial
Rome. The origin of this tail, Mosley
says, lies in the Florentine lettering of the
ifteenth century. Particularly, he inds a
striking resemblance between the new born
Gill’s R and the letter from the inscription
on a monument to the Marchese Spinetta
Malaspina (dating from the second quarter
of the ifteenth century) from a vanished
church in Verona. This becomes interesting
in relation to the fact that the authors of
the Romain du roi also used not the Trajan
model as a source, but the Renaissance
lettering, which still appealed to ancient
inscriptions. (Mosley, James. Eric Gill’s R:
the Italian connection. [online] London,
December 2009. Available from: <http://
typefoundry.blogspot.co.uk/2009_12_01_
archive.html> [Accessed 02 September
2012]).
127 Jammes, ref. 113, p. 80.
128 Mosley, ref. 30.
129 A term by Joyce S. and Arthur E. Gordon.
130 Burke, ref. 33.
131 Burke, ref. 14, p. 150.
132 Mosley, James. French academicians and
modern typography. In: Stiff, Paul, ed.
Typography Papers 2, London: Hyphen
Press, 1997, p. 8.
was a characteristic feature of the ancient Roman alphabet and was
carefully preserved by Pacioli, Verini, Tory, and all others. But the
truly exposing letter is R. Its curved leg reveals the calligraphic
origin (or, as Morison suggested, an inluence of the seventeenth
century engraving practice) of the Romain du roi, which is most evident in the lower case. Any geometrically constructed R would have
a straight leg at the junction with the head, and only its tail would
be curved. This was proved by the drawings of Feliciano, Alberti,
Pacioli, Moyllus, Tory, Verini, and even an anonymous designer of
the Newberry alphabet, whose drawings with a ‘fairly complicated
geometry’125 could be at irst sight collated with the Romain du
roi construction engravings. It is signiicant that the same curved
R would become an illustrious feature of Gill Sans, whose geometrical construction has always been a debatable issue.126 On the
contrary, all truly geometrical typefaces like Futura or Tschichold’s
sans serif typeface have a straight leg in this letter (ig. 17).
Not a geometric principle, but a calligraphic one was dominating the design of the Romain du roi. ‘Were not the new types of
Grandjean, like Simonneau’s models, an attempt to rival the grace
and elegance of the calligraphy of Jarry and his successors?’ asked
Jammes.127 At their core, calligraphic features are hostile to geometrical construction. The Renaissance artists, consolidating serifs and the
contrast in the thickness of strokes in their geometrical drawings, are
likely to have been unconscious of their calligraphic origin, although
basically these features are ‘the result of laying out the lettering on
stone with a broad brush’.128 The Modernists would reduce this and
other inconsistencies, having got rid of the ‘shaded’ stroke129 and
serifs in their designs. Christopher Burke wrote that Paul Renner, in
his published statements during the design and production of Futura,
‘clearly expressed his desire to suppress any visible reference to the
calligraphic heritage of small letters, and to bring them under the
inluence of the static form that governed capitals’.130 As well as Jan
Tschichold, who praised Futura for its manifestation of his major
requirement for an ideal sans serif: ‘the eradication of calligraphic
features from the lower case’.131 The Romain du roi, on the contrary,
although went for a vertical stress, still forced calligraphic features of
the letterforms. James Mosley stated that the greater contrast between
thick and thin strokes, and the smoothness of the curves and the thin
serifs ‘are features engendered by the new school of calligraphy that
had spread from Italy to France during the century, and which was
brilliantly deployed in engraving on copper plates’.132
28
ig. 17 The letter Rs by Feliciano (above left), Moyllus (above middle), Tory (above right), and Verini (below left)
against the letter R from the Romain du roi (below right).
29
Conclusion
133 Cresci, ref. 2, p. 12.
134 Mosley, James. Trajan revived. In:
Hutchings, R. S. Alphabet: international
annual of letterforms. vol. 1, Birmingham:
Kynoch Press, 1964, p. 32.
135 McLean, Ruari. Jan Tschichold:
typographer. London: Lund Humphries,
1990, p. 15.
As this dissertation shows, there were only two periods when the
geometrical approach to letter design became if not a dominant, but a
major and signiicant trend: the Renaissance and Modernist eras. On
the one hand, it was connected with the general spirit of the epochs,
which turned out to be alike. Geometrically constructed letterforms
were produced by so–called Renaissance men, who aimed to break
the boundaries, not only to provide a legible type, but stand for more
ambitious aims: the reformation of the language, for instance. While
Geofroy Tory enlightened on the proper use of the French language,
the Modernists (Herbert Bayer, Jan Tschichold, Kurt Schwitters)
suggested new types of script. Geometry was a tool that helped him
to achieve a new order. It also added to the consolidation of this
order by providing exact rules, so that the artists were sure that their
precepts would not be broken. The major source for these artists was
the Roman capital alphabet. ‘One of the paradoxes of the Renaissance is that, while it appears to strive forward, its inspiration is
frequently backward–looking; its aims were often to resurrect the
practice of ancient Rome and to probe the rules which governed this
practice’, noticed A. S. Osley.133 Interestingly, the same can be said in
relation to Modernism. The Trajan inscription, which was commonly
accepted as a model, provided ground for these alphabets to have
been constructed geometrically. Not only because of the hypothesis
that ancient lettering was constructed with the help of a compass and
rule, but also because this particular inscription featured letterforms,
‘in which the calligraphic traces are only vestigial’.134 The common
source was treated with a different degree of reverence. During the
Modernist period, artists became suficiently bold to remove all the
calligraphic features that the Renaissance artists could derive from
the ancient times. However, despite therefore quite different appearances of the letterforms, artists from the Renaissance and Modernism shared the same principles, which a geometrical approach and
the spirit of the epochs dictated. Among them were the simplicity of
form, restriction to only a certain range of these forms, which sometimes even revealed itself in the restriction to a one case alphabet.
On the other hand, the use of geometry can be justiied by technical
reasons. ‘Typographic design is conditioned by the kind of printing
being used; a designer designs speciically for an intended process
and materials, just as an architect designs for steel, glass, stones or
bricks’, said Ruari McLean.135 If the Roman inscriptions have been
constructed geometrically, the reasons for that seem to be clear: it
is quite inconvenient to draw the letters of such height freehand.
The Renaissance artists took after the grand size of letters, which is
proved by most of the treatises discussed above. But the Renaissance
witnessed a crucial change in the use of type. Since then it was being
30
more and more used in printing books rather than in cutting inscriptions. A gradual decline of interest in geometrical constructions might
be linked to the inability to accurately reproduce these on a smaller
scale. Two factors might have pushed the artists in the twentieth century
to revive geometrical principles and transfer them onto the typeface industry. The irst is the widespread use of the pantograph, which permitted the scaling of type drawings. The other is the mechanisation of type
manufacture. Compared to punch–cutters’ skills, a machine showed
almost perfect conformity to the type drawing regardless of which type
size was required.
31
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35