The Voynich Ninja

Reading in the vague vaults of the Hermetism I noticed that not only humors and planets were associated with plants, but also colors are connected. 
I never looked at the colors in the Vms, but for those who investigated that: how many separate colors are there in the ms?

I'm hoping for: violet, blue, orange, yellow, green,  red, and black.  That is 7 distinct colors.

More importantly, are all colors used in the herbals?

This is not very easy to answer since depending on the mixing of the pigments you get different shades.
One thing of note is that a certain color range is absent from the mansucript: the pink to purple colors. It's also strangely uncommon to paint surfaces black.

I have a blog post sitting in initial draft stage for a few months already about the color palette. The idea came when JKP pointed out that probably two different painters had worked on the MS, and that one of them favored a richer palette.

I wanted to build on this by first sampling the color range in each plant page, using photoshop (taking a 5 by 5 average with the eyedropper tool). This in order to establish objectively that there are differences in the palettes used, corresponding to a painting technique (IIRC there's a even painter and a scratchy painter). Then the idea was to compare these data to Currier A and B pages. This could yield insights into the order of manufacturing the MS and how the various artisans interacted. 

It got stuck because I wasn't entirely satisfied with the way of comparing colors, and it's a lot of work. But I still think the results would be interesting, no matter the outcome.

Where did I just read that there was an ancient application of yellow paint that has mainly washed out? Was it somewhere on ReneZ's site?

There is the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that was analyzed in the published report.

There might be a couple of shades of green and these have been blended quite effectively, sometimes also with blue added, to create several shades of green.

There is the distinctive washed-out amber which may have been created by watering down brownish-yellow or by using an amber pigment that has faded.

There is red, sometimes applied heavily, sometimes applied lightly (perhaps to simulate pink, although it still looks red).

There is brown, which is adjusted with different amounts of liquid to make it light or dark and which may sometimes have been mixed with that very dark blackish-brown, although it's hard to tell what might have been originally black because iron gall ink, for example, which was sometimes also used for sketching, gets lighter with age.


There is brick red which was probably made by adding a bit of red to the brown.

There's a tiny bit of white, very sparingly used and almost impossible to locate.


Those are the primary pigments.


There is a distinctive lack of orange, violet, or pink (lightly dabbed red somewhat passes for pink). If violet pigments (usually made from crushed gemstones) are not available, some painters will mix blue and red, but this is not always possible if the chemical components of the blue and red don't mix. If they chemically fight each other, you get a muddy color that is best avoided.

Orange was a very prevalent color in manuscripts painted in the Roman tradition. They had a lot of basic green and a fairly distinctive, reasonably bright orange. This distinctive shade of orange is not found in the VMS.


I blogged about this some time ago and I'm still collecting data to see if I can find any closer matches, but at the time I first mentioned it, the closest I had been able to find to a pigment match and drawing style for the VMS is in manuscripts from the Diepolt Lauber studio (look at the critter You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Some of the Lauber-studio manuscript colors are very similar to the VMS, and some of them have a few more colors (it was a commercial scriptorium so the number of pigments used may have been related to the size of the patron's pocketbook plus, being a scriptorium, the level of drawing skill and paint-mixing skill was higher than the VMS, but the basic way of creating shapes and the colors are in the same ballpark).