The Voynich Ninja

(31-07-2017, 05:08 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.... I still believe that matching the illustrations and the text could greatly contribute to our understanding of the ms.

I believe that is quite the case on page 82r  : reading a label allowed me to identify the subject of the page.

(26-07-2017, 01:43 PM)Wladimir D Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.On the question of the dead nymph, I want to note the following. This is the only nymph, in which only the head is visible.
What is green paint? If this is a mortal shroud, then along with the "fire" it is like burning with the Buddhist rite (the star is the soul).
If the green paint is "dirty" water - then in the lying position of the nymph, her legs do not fit on the bed and should be bent into the mouth of the "funnel". This can be interpreted as 1 / annihilation 2 / as a rebirth (rejuvenation), as in a Russian fairy tale, when Ivan bathed in a vat of hot milk.
I assume this on the basis of the fact that the lower part of the throat is an inverted tip ( of tent), that we can be moved to consider this page with an extension in page  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (or 75v, 78r).

I don't see her as dead at all, i see her as resting. Snug in her bed, at home.



The green paint is salt water.
The inverted tip of the tent, or finial, denotes an old volcano.
She has no arms or legs because nymph arm and leg poses denote historical info and the lack of them means something new is going on.

I think she denotes the mouth of the Tagus river, which is open to the Atlantic ocean, therefore brackish, or salt water. Lisbon is located nearby.

The curvey line that precedes this nymph is the shoreline of Europe north of this point.

Resting because we just did a trip around Europe in the quire, starting from Sagres Point, just to the south.

Also, she updates us as to the most western part of Europe, it is not Sagres Point as Strabo had indicated, but Cabo da Roca, which would be her face. Cabo del Roca is an extinct volcano.



See the plus signs on the left, that is the area of Cabo da Roca. It indicates late Cretaceous intrusive massif.

Note that the Tagus river did not always look the way it does now, silt has filled in areas that used to be open. The Tagus runs along a fault line and the mouth was initially formed by a rift caused by earthquake. It later joined with rivers coming from Spain.





You can see the shape of the green paint in the older maps.

In 1385 a new king John I was crowned, after a 2 year period without a monarch ruling the country . He married Phillipa of Lancaster, forming an AngloPortuguese alliance that still remains today. His reign lasted until 1433.
Lisbon became a new centre for trade, and had signed agreements with allies in Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Florence, all of which had merchants living there, who became the new nobles. They took Ceuta in 1415 which expanded their power and reach. Thus it was a new society at the time of the manuscript's creation, one that began the Age of Discovery. I would not be surprised if this particular society was directly involved with our manuscript in some way.

In a sense, it does represent a rebirth.

Just noticed in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., a 14th-century miscellany of alchemical works.

[attachment=3202]

Sadly, this appears to be an idle drawing with no annotation!..

(23-08-2019, 09:22 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Just noticed in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., a 14th-century miscellany of alchemical works.

Oh! I know these... I was looking at an Albertus Magni book on Google Books and a subsquent search led me to this one.

I sampled the text about a year ago. On the previous folio there's a note that looks like it was added a decade or so after the original text (based on the handwriting) but it's impossible to tell if the drawings were added at the same time. Two of them have crosses on top. They look like test drawings for embellishments to historiated initials or something along those lines.

It's so typical that whenever there's something similar to the VMS it always seems to be shrouded in its own personal little mystery. I never had time to follow it up to see if the same style of decoration was used other places.

I just remembered what these designs reminded me of when I first saw them...

Designs for rings and pendants.


I'll grab an example... be right back...


Okay, here is a reliquary cross courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum. This one happens to be c. 1470s Germany (I only searched for a few seconds, don't have a lot of time right now):

[attachment=3203]


You can click You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to see the full-sized image.

The top image might be a sketch for a ring, the bottom ones maybe for pendants. There was also a lot of cross-fertilization... illustrators often used jewelry in their borders and backgrounds and jewelers probably got ideas from the decorative elements in drawings.

Here's a medieval reliquary cross (Italy, late 1300s) with a tiny central window (image source The Met, public domain):

In addition toYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (left), there's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (right). A minimally different version of the text (Venetian dialect) is transcribed in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Cono A . Mangieri; it is an interesting match for the subject of this thread.

No se pò trovar tonsego qe morti susitase,
[ni] flore de tal fata qe leprosi mondase,
[m]ai cui trovar poësele, d’auro varìa tal massa,
[m]aior de le montagne de la tera de Rassa.

Mangieri also provides an Italian translation. Translated into English:

One cannot find a medicine that can revive the dead, or such a flower that can cleanse lepers, but if someone could find them, they would be worth a mass of gold greater than the mountains of the land of Serbia.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has a scene with a star. In this case, the reclining figure is sleeping resting (EDIT: the following verses make clear that he is awake).

Levaime una maitina a la stela dïana;
entrai en un çardino q’era su ’na flumana
et era plen de flore aulente plui de grana;
colgaime su le flore apres’ una fontana.

One morning I rose with the star diana (= very early): I entered a garden that was next to a river and was full of flowers more fragrant than alchermes; I lay down on the flowers near a fountain.

That's a great find, Marco, it doesn't get much better than that. A strangely blue star just above a sleeping figure, those are remarkable parallels.
(The contexts are certainly different: the sleeper awoken by the star Diana is at the beginning of a long rant about how awful some women are).

The impression I get from this manuscript and its texts is that it was intended above all for learning Latin. (It includes the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). This reminds me a bit of some parallels we found in Dati's La Sfera, because this work was also often used in educational contexts.

Marco, I'm wondering about how "stela diana" would have been understood. Etymologically, it seems like "diana" comes from Latin for "day", and has nothing to do with the goddess. However, in the poem You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Guido Guinizzelli, it seems like the author is certainly aware of the goddess' name and plays on it?

1. Vedut’ho la lucente stella diana,
2. ch’apare anzi che ’l giorno rend’albore,
3. c’ha preso forma di figura umana;
4. sovr’ogn’altra me par che dea splendore: