Comments on: Voynich palimpsest hypothesis…?

By: Diane

Diane — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:45:35 +0000

This doesn’t seem to be the spot to talk about the ‘wolkenbanden’ – or in plain English the sign of the world’s limit which was also used in one of the scripts too (will check which) as a sign of terminus.

It’s actually another indication that the imagery in the Voynich is most likely to have been copied from at least one earlier work.

By: nickpelling

nickpelling — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:51:53 +0000

Hi Michelle,

I suspect that a different ink and a different quill were used for the two types of line, and that the two layers serve quite different purposes. My hope is that forensically separating those layers will help us reconstruct what those different purposes were. Because other examples of layering don’t seem to have perspective / depth based intention, I doubt that perspective will turn out to be the whole story here…

Cheers, …Nick Pelling…

By: Michelle

Michelle — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:14:00 +0000

Oh and he might have been trying to purvey an idea of 2 different perspectives in the same drawing, ie that there is a covered well or fountain with water IN it, how would he do this except for drawing both (thus drawing it ‘lighter’).

By: Michelle

Michelle — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:10:43 +0000

Whoever did the Vms was no artist, it’s enough to look at the drawings!, but someone with no talent but a like of drawing would know that finer lines ( turning the nib) would be used to make perspective ( ie make something look behind) darker, thicker lines are used for something in the foreground. Regarding the time-lapse: seeing that there are no errors and crossings out, I would guess that the Vms was written over a longer period of time, rather than just copied all at once. So maybe the author kept adding to his little book that he started earlier in his ( or her) life.

By: nickpelling

nickpelling — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:01:38 +0000

The traditional art history notion is usually that styles originate in the cities and then diffuse out into the provinces: so if an artefact has a more provincial style, you tend to allow (say) up to a couple of decades to account for that diffusion. So, the uncertainty that lets Panofsky skew his latest dating right up to 1510-1520 is a fairly one-sided affair. That is, his 1470 … 1510/1520 probably meant 1470 +/- 20 years (dating uncertainty) + 0..20 years (provincial diffusion uncertainty).

As for Sergio’s dating range, I’ll ask him again, see what his current thoughts are…

By: Rene Zandbergen

Rene Zandbergen — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:47:32 +0000

With Panofsky, it is clear what he is saying. 1470 is his middle date,
but we have no information on his uncertainty. He considers a later
date only in order to accommodate the supposed sunflower, but he was
clearly thinking pre-Columbian (and German).

With respect to Toresella, in the original note from Jim Reeds he
quotes 1450-1460. I know that you have also talked to him a lot.
Rather than speculate, it would seem valuable to get his opinion on
his uncertainty margin. I have noticed several times that the real
experts tend to be very careful with their conclusions and
interpretations.

For me, a ‘completion date’ (apart from the folio numbers) around
1440-1445 does not seem to violate the available evidence
too strongly. This, however, is only based on the numbers.

I fully agree that the unusually shaped foldout sheets are a relevant
piece of the puzzle of the MS construction timeline.

By: nickpelling

nickpelling — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 08:59:58 +0000

The problem seems to be that it is highly unlikely that a large batch of vellum would be cut into unusual shapes all at the same time and stored for 40 years before actually being used. Hence it is very likely that the vellum was indeed first used pretty much at the time it was made. The question I’m posing here is whether this initial writing may have later been erased before being re-enciphered in place (i.e. on the same sheet).

As far as erasures go, I think the absence of signs of rubbing may not be the ‘deal breaker’ you suggest. According to the research I cited in the post, not all medieval inks interact with the support material – for example, you can usefully think of many carbon-based inks as floating on the surface of the vellum, not really binding to it. Accordingly, some inks and paints can simply be washed off vellum, rather than forcefully removed. Remember that vellum is processed animal skin, so has a natural water-resistance: as I understand it, to leave a waterstain on vellum, you’d have to leave it immersed in water for a while – just washing it and drying it wouldn’t be enough.

The point I was making was that in f77v, I suspect that the thin ‘structure’ lines may well still be from that initial layer, and so we could perform spectroscopic analysis on a tiny spot of that material to see if it would be able to be washed easily off, or whether it would need to be scraped off.

Sergio Toresella’s dating was emphatic: that the handwriting was distinctly similar to a number of those from Milan circa 1470. I don’t think he would accept even a pre-1460 dating for it, let alone 1420, which provides another element of historical dissonance to deal with. As far as Panofsky goes, I get the impression that he was pretty sold on 1470 too, but that he wanted to hedge around the sunflower issue (which was then being far more actively debated than it is now):-

Q: What’s the date?
A: But for the sunflower, would have guessed 1470. “However, since the style of the drawings is fairly provincial, a somewhat later date, even the first years of the sixteenth century, would not seem to be excluded. I should not go lower than ca. 1510-1520 because no influence of the Italian Renaissance style is evident.”
Q: Why do you think so?
A: Character of the script, style of drawing, such costumes as are in evidence on certain pages, for example folio 72 recto.

Finally: excellent news about the f42 folio number – though only a small detail, it all helps to sequence the layering. Much appreciated!

By: Rene Zandbergen

Rene Zandbergen — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 07:46:00 +0000

There is definitely no rubbing on the manuscript, which would be a sign
of erasure of a previous text. This is the essence of the press
statement which was misunderstood to mean that the ink was
immediately applied to the vellum after it was created. Thus,
unsurprisingly the palimpsest theory is out (as it was never ‘in’ anyway).

For me, the next step would rather be to (re-)evaluate ‘all the’ evidence
for the late 15th C.
First of all, theories like ‘it was probably written by Mr.X’, don’t have any
weight at all. For the C-14 dating we have a probability interval.
Similarly, for the other observations one would also need an ‘error
bar’ or a weight. Erwin Panofsky suggested 1470, but was willing to
go up to the early 16th century. Does this imply an uncertainty of 40 years?
Unfortunately, he is no longer around to ask, but Sergio Toresella is…

Also, I could very well imagine that the creation of the MS took someone
15 or 20 years.

On layers: I should have mentioned this before.
Nick, you suggested (long ago) that one detail to look at during the
forensic examinations was the folio number 42 which is written
through a plant drawing. During the film recordings in October
I asked Joe Barabe on your behalf, and he had a look through the
microscope, concluding that the folio number was written while
the green pigment was already on the page.
This of course fits with the ‘normal scenario’ that these folio numbers
were added later.

By: nickpelling

nickpelling — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:20:20 +0000

You have to remember that we’ve had decades (if not centuries) of people speculating about what the VMs might be, as if hypnotized by the immensity of the historical challenge. It is only in the last few years that a handful of people have started to look at incongruous or awkward details such as this and ask “what happened here so as to leave this page in this state?”, which is a far more forensic (and, dare I say it, a far more useful) approach. Welcome aboard!

It’s hard to generalize about fine and broad lines in the VMs: what is striking about this image is its (apparently layered) juxtaposition of the two. The scans released by the Beinecke are at the same (dpi) resolution as this image, so you’d have to do a higher-res scan to get any more detail.

Incidentally, the water quire has a number of other anomalously-layered drawings I’m not sure about: f76v top right, f77v top left, f77v bottom left, f79v bottom left, f80v middle left, f83v top left, etc. I really do think that some kind of non-obvious layering is going on with the water nymphs, and that some kind of multispectral imaging might be able to help us understand what the layers were (and how each layer transformed the preceding layers).

By: Niels E

Niels E — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:31:26 +0000

Yes, the house is certainly drawn in a finer and fainter line. I don’t know about the ink. Yes, the top left of the inner circle of the pool is the same fine line. Could this simply be the result of changing the pen? How common are the fine and broader line types in V?

A closeup of the places where the lines of the various elements intersect might tell us the order they were drawn in.

The “What’s going on?” question is what makes V so intriguing, imo. Everything is strange and we’re not really sure about anything. Well, a fact or two we might be sure about, but in general it’s all just plain weird. And the more we learn, the weirder it becomes.